From USDC Payments to Stablecoin Settlements: Checkout.com Unveils New Merchant Options at Money20/20 Europe

Welcome.

We are here at Money 2020 Europe in Amsterdam, and I am so pleased to be joined by Meron Colbeci, Chief Product Officer at Checkout.com.

Thank you so much for joining.

Great to be here.

So tell us a little bit about Checkout.com just to.

Really understand the full landscape of what Checkout.com does.

Of course.

So we're a global payments provider.

We've been around for around 1213 years, and you know we really focus on supporting global enterprises such as Uber.

Uh, Pinterest, Spotify, uh, and many other like well known global brands, um, in accepting payments.

Uh, what we focus on primarily is, uh, their payment performance.

How do we make sure that the most transactions go through.

And that's our core value proposition.

And over time we've expanded into additional financial services such as issuing, such as treasury services, and multiple payment methods to get support on the platform.

Fabulous.

And then speaking of issuing and of all these different payment methods, um, first day of money 2020, you had your first announcement, and do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah, so.

You know, the, the theme for us at this Money 2020 in Europe is a focus on digital, digital payments and digital payment methods.

Um, so today we're announcing a partnership with our friends at Coinbase, uh, and basically enabling uh global acceptance of, uh, stablecoins, uh, on our platform.

So what does that mean?

Let me unpack that a little bit, um.

Essentially, uh, there is, there are consumers around the world that use stablecoins for whatever reasons, whether it's because in countries where there's not as much card acceptance, uh, maybe it's because, uh, local currency is very volatile, uh, whether it's because they have um stablecoins because they just sold other forms of crypto, so many reasons for consumers to have it.

Uh, merchants currently usually don't support accepting payments on stablecoins and so in partnership with Coinbase we're facilitating that.

Uh, we're starting with USDC, uh, which is, um, you know, one of the most common stablecoins today, uh, and essentially through this partnership from a consumer perspective they're able to pay with any wallet that they come in with, uh, pay with their stablecoins from a merchant perspective.

It's, it's relatively seamless.

They continue to accept fiat on the back end as they did before as part of their regular settlement.

Coinbase is holding the stablecoin, is facilitating the exchange, and we transmit the money seamlessly back to the merchant.

So hopefully this is something that will enable adoption and will really allow us to test out whether stablecoins can really be used as a payment fee.

And it seems like you're really addressing a particular friction point in that adoption cycle of really connecting the dots between the various stakeholders in the ecosystem.

Tell us a bit about today's announcement on the 2nd day of Money 2020.

So exciting news.

So the second thing that we're announcing is that, uh, you know, we, we talked about acceptance before.

Now this is about the settlement side.

So as a, as a payment provider, as an acquirer, uh, you know, we receive payments from all different forms of payments whether it's through cards, or alternative payments, stablecoins potentially.

But essentially there is a back end of settling with the merchants, paying out the merchants on a day by day basis.

And so in partnerships with our friends at Fireblocks, we're enabling stablecoin settlement.

So a merchant may elect, irrespective of how they accept payments on the front end. may elect to receive stablecoins on the back end.

This is on demand, so I can go into checkout's user interface and request a settlement in stablecoins.

We support USDC and USDT.

Um, and a user, a merchant can request these payments settled to them again, very similar to our other announcements, we are relying on the services and that our partners provide for exchange, etc. and we're trying to make this as seamless as possible for the merchants in the back end.

I think, you know, last year, and these numbers are growing year on year, um, stablecoin payments, um, and generally there was around $390 billion in uh payments uh globally.

And there's a survey that was done, I think that was done recently that showed that about 90% of businesses around the world are evaluating their stablecoin strategy and how to leverage stablecoins, and so we think that both of our announcements are tapping into that both on the front end and on the back end.

And it really seems that alongside reducing any friction that exists there, you're also adding so many options in for your merchants, and I get the impression that the real goal here is not a full replacement of the financial rails and how everyone spends money, but rather just giving more options alongside.

Existing payments.

Exactly.

Tell us more about that.

Yeah, I mean, one of our core product principles overall at Checkout is customer choice.

So we don't have a, we don't believe in steering a merchant into a particular payment method or into a particular way of working.

We believe in supporting as many options as possible.

Um, this is an emerging, uh, use case and an emerging payment method that is, that is coming up.

Uh, we wanna facilitate that.

We wanna enable that, um, and see how the adoption, uh, how the adoption goes, uh, overall.

I think it's magic to see that progress happening.

So fascinating to be here, as you say, you know, you've got Money 2020 comes every year and every year we see so much progress.

And if we were lucky enough to meet here again in 3 to 5 years' time, what do you think the headlines will be?

What are the signals of that kind of progress?

I mean, it's hard to imagine.

3 to 5 years is a very long time.

Uh, in this world, and, you know, the caveat that I would make is, you know, I, I personally, I started working on stable coins in 2018 where we thought that we were on the cusp of the of a revolution and things happened in the middle.

The administrations changed, regulatory environment changed, etc.

I think that today we're on much more stable, stable ground, if you will, with the Genius Act in the US with the MCA license that's that's emerging here in Europe, and so I think that there is a much clearer path to adoption than we had we had before.

So I don't know about 3 or 5 years, but you know next year potentially I think that we'll hopefully see.

More adoption and more users coming onto onto this platform and leveraging it and we'll see new use cases and we'll go from there.

Absolutely.

And to your point, the regulatory clarity that's being driven now maybe sets the path for even in 5 years for that not really to be news because it's just The norm that there are these options and they exist and you know we want it to stay exciting, but that's what progress looks like.

So thank you so much for joining us and enjoy the rest of the conference.

My pleasure thank you very much.

Great news about all your announcements.

Thank you very much, my pleasure.