Checkout

Overview
The process will not only include payer’s bank, receiver’s bank, but also payment gateway, payment processor and acquirer. Checkout.com is a payment receiving method that bundled all of these middle processes.

Checkout.com sees itself as a technology company dealing with financial payments. It helps companies accept more payments around the world through one integration. Its unified global payment processing platform features in-country acquiring, relevant payment methods, feature parity across geographies, fraud filters, and reporting features, via one API. Its payment reporting tool also monitors customer data and keeps track of your revenue. The company’s fraud detection tool also monitors in real-time, has 3D secure technology and daily risk report. Competitors like Braintree, BlueSnap, Square and Stripe along with others are the existing and potential competitors.

History
Founded by Guillaume Pousaz in 2010 (M&A research catalyst) and incorporated on the 19th of April 2012, checkout.com was originally known as Opus Payments and changed its name to Checkout.com in 2012. Checkout.com built their platform and their own backend processing that combined with the gateway and the licenses to put them on an upward trajectory. Whilst other technology companies were focused on building their distribution and exposure, Checkout.com were focused on building their technology that power payments.

Checkout.com is headquartered in London, the UK. It also has operations also in the UAE, the US,Mauritius, Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong and France.

Checkout.com first became profitable in 2012 and then started expanding into other countries starting off with the UAE in 2013. Currently Checkout.com have 300+ employees across 8 offices (Appendix1- Checkout.com timeline). The 2018 Income statement revealed that revenues grew to $75 million from $47 million a revenue growth of 59.64% from previous year (M&A research catalyst). Their gross profit also came in strong at $35.5 million in 2018, up from $23.9 million in the prior year (Forbes, 2019). Currently Deloitte disclose their growth at 15,548% (Deloitte, 2019).

Very recently the 02/05/2019 Checkout.com received $230 million in Series A (first round) Investment (highest ever investment for a Fintech company till date). This Investment was led by Insight Venture Management LLC (Insight Partners) & DST Global Advisors Ltd. This round of Investment also included GIC Pte Ltd, Blossom Capital Ltd & Endeavor Catalyst – a fund managed by Endeavor Global Inc. The size of individual investments is unknown.

Customers
Checkout has one customer group, merchants who want to receive digital credit payment. The number of customers for Checkout.com is unknown. They cater to the B2B market where their current customer base consists of merchants like Deliveroo, Samsung, Virgin, Adidas, EasyGroup.

However, Checkout has a list of prohibited business practices.For example, they do not accept customers in businesses of cigarettes and weapons.

Engagement  — Value Creation Proposition
How checkout create value for merchants.

Checkout.com engages with its customers (businesses) as the one stop shop for their cross-border payment solutions. The bundling feature is important because once there is a problem with a payment, the merchant could contact checkout to solve the issue. If the process is decentralized among different 3rd party providers, it is difficult to identify responsibility. Additionally, the bundling improved payment processing time.

The businesses are able to accept all major credit and debit cards worldwide along with other payment options. Checkout.com allows the businesses to view their online transactions, see how much they are making, see each individual customer via the Checkout Hub – which is a dashboard for the businesses with data points. These data points can be helpful in formulating business strategies on a global and ‘glocal’ level. For example- Businesses can view how much is coming from each customer and in which region – this can allow the business or brand to tailor their marketing strategies.

Delivery — Value Chain
How checkout works for merchants:

• Customers are encouraged to open a trial account to see how Checkout works.
• Checkout deliver the value of a greater number of payable customers by accepting more than 25 payment methods and more than 150 processing curries. So that customers of merchants are likely to find their preferred payment option and currency.
• Customers are able to enhance their using experience by manipulating APIs of Checkout.
• A unified technological platform is created to process all funds. So that users can have access to dashboard to see details of transactions from different devices. Merchants can also use the platform to handle their dispute, update account, communicate with relationship manager and etc.

Monetisation — Value Capture
Checkout charge their customers a flat rate of 0.95% of the transaction plus $0.20 for European cards and 2.9% of the transaction plus $0.20 for non-European cards

Digital Technology
Checkout claims to use machine-learning as the technology to monitor and control how merchants authorize, void or decline payments. So that checkout could find an optimal balance between fraud and approval rate. Card information is protected via tokenization technology.