EXCLUSIVE: “Check it Out!” – Rory O’Neill, Checkout.com in ‘The Fintech Magazine’

Rory O’Neill, Chief Marketing Officer at Checkout.com, one of the world’s biggest payment platforms, has some key words of advice for merchants

Checkout.com works with the who’s who of the digital economy. Its client list is a global catwalk of familiar consumer and B2B names – Alibaba, adidas, Delivery Hero, Docusign, Dyson, Ikea, Remitly, The Financial Times, Sainsbury’s, Sony, Uber Eats, Wise and Vinted among them.

Just 40 of those merchants process more than $1billion a year across Checkout.com’s platform, which supports 145 currencies. Last year alone the company welcomed another 300-plus new enterprise-sized clients and it’s set a target of achieving a 30 per cent increase in net revenue in 2025. That’s on top of 45 per cent year-on-year net revenue growth the previous year.

Given where the digital payments market is heading – it’ll be worth US$20.37trillion in 2025, according to Statista – that scale of expansion is looking entirely achievable. Nevertheless, according to Checkout.com’s Chief Marketing Officer Rory O’Neill, many companies still don’t give payments the strategic priority they deserve.

After all, he says: “If you don’t take a payment, you can’t get to revenue. And if you can’t get revenue, you can’t get to profit. And if you can’t get to profit, you can’t get to cash.”

The data around a transaction is even more valuable, which is why he believes companies should reflect payments’ importance within their hierarchies. We asked O’Neill for his key observations on digital payments trends and what companies should be focussed on.

These were his reflections…

Every company should have a chief payments officer

Super-successful companies no longer treat payments as a finance function, says O’Neill. Instead, they recognise payments as being distinctly and powerfully important, touching a whole range of departments and strategies. It’s ‘so important and so material’ in fact, that it should be ‘more present in the boardroom’.

“I know many great CFOs. But the problem is that when you’re running a finance team, it’s not necessarily connected to the customer experience,” says O’Neill. “A lot of the really big digital brands now have the payments function rolling up into product or into customer experience because it’s such an important part of that journey. That’s what our world now looks like, and our businesses need to reflect that shift.”

Key to this is understanding that payments unlock data across departments and inform communication, loyalty and marketing strategy, says O’Neill.

Data derived from Checkout.com’s billions of transactions a year encourages collaboration, better performance and the development of a complex understanding of customers’ habits, needs and wants. It gives insights into spending trends on key retail events in the year, such as Black Friday or Valentine’s Day, and drills down into demographic behaviour changes, depending on geography and location.

“We did some research on the data across our network and found some super-interesting stuff around, for example, Gen Zs,” says O’Neill. It’s amazing to see how much growth there is in parents buying mobile phone subscriptions, or music subscriptions, or TV subscriptions for their children, for instance, particularly in the US and UK. But in China, it totally flips – the Gen Zs buy them for their parents! There are very generational changes, in different countries.

“We’ve also looked at how people respond to offers around the world at certain times of the year. In the UAE, for example, they have the highest propensity (84 per cent) to take an offer on a subscription and then stay with that offer. That kind of insight for merchants is super-important, because if their marketing teams don’t have offers for subscription services, then they need to introduce them because they are such an important tool.

“It’s great to be able to get those kind of insights from looking at the data.”

In payments, greater collaboration is going to lead to better performance

In the off-line world of in-person payments, a customer holding their card and putting it in a machine is pretty much guaranteed their payment will go through, if they have the funds available. In the more risky environment of digital payments, however, the success rate falls to around 80 per cent, equating to billions of lost revenue for merchants. Checkout.com focusses on preventing that leakage, says O’Neill.

“Retailers are comparing the price they have to pay (for payments providers) and the acceptance rate they’re getting, versus the acceptable fraud limits”

“We make sure that we’re putting all our resources, all our tech, all our infrastructure, all our AI, all our machine learning into helping the network process digital payments “There is no finish line for us. We are constantly and furiously chasing basis points (bips), trying to close that gap. If we can get the companies that work with us, one bip or two bips on their payments acceptance rate, it can represent tens, millions, billions of dollars.

“The way you break through the acceptance rate challenge in digital payments is to share and collaborate over data, with more parties involved in the ecosystem. If you really want to fix fraud, for instance, then get to the source, which is the card issuers. If we can share data with the issuers about how our algorithms work, so that they know more about the merchant codes, and we, in return, get data that tells us more about the consumer, there’s more chance that you can fight fraud and risk associated with digital payments, while also dealing with the compliance aspects at the same time.”

Good retailing is about taking people’s money in the form they want to part with it

A huge part of the value of the data that Checkout.com and others in its network collect is understanding what the barriers to digital payments are from the customer’s perspective. More than 70 per cent of consumers say they have been permanently put off from returning to a site because it did not have their preferred payment method, according to Statista.

With this in mind, in May 2024, Checkout.com launched Flow, a product designed to offer consumers their preferred payment experience at the moment of checkout and therefore combat cart abandonment. Businesses can boost their conversion rates by offering buyers their preferred payment, method based on location, currency, and the type of device customers are using. It also allows companies to integrate Flow into their brands – including font styles and colour schemes – and can adapt to a user’s local needs by adjusting the checkout process to the relevant language.

All of this comes with the security offered by Flow of staying up to date with PCI compliance, GDPR rules, and card scheme requirements.

“It’s a really clever piece of code,” says O’Neill, “which is embedded in websites and makes it very easy for merchants to start processing payments. It uses intelligence to auto-present the payment that a consumer is going to need, based on their location. If you present the right payment method, you can increase conversion. That’s just one example of how we’re trying to optimise for the macro trends in very micro ways.”

When it’s really high performing, checkout is completely invisible

O’Neill says Checkout.com will continue to use merchants as its eyes and ears when evaluating trends in consumer behaviours and preferences.

If a payment method attracts a critical mass of merchants asking for it, Checkout.com will support it.

In searching for the perfect payment experience, one thing is guaranteed, he says – customers will want it to be completely invisible while also being completely secure. That means merchants must determine a payment-to-value equation that’s acceptable to their business.

“Retailers are balancing the price they pay to payments providers and the acceptance rate they’re getting, versus the acceptable fraud limits,” says O’Neill. “As part of getting that equation right, I think we are going to see more payments becoming embedded so they are more simple and invisible for the customer.

“For example, on a flight back from Riyadh recently, my phone knew when I was going to land, because it’s in my Google calendar. My phone also knew what taxi I tend to order when I leave the airport. So, there’s no reason why my phone provider and a payments provider couldn’t all get together to use AI to embed that experience completely – book the taxi at the right time in the right place and do it all for me, given the right sort of prompts.

“That level of integration is difficult to coordinate and schedule, but I think the tech will solve it for us. AI agents are going to evolve to become increasingly customised. They’ll sit somewhere between the hardware and a trusted identity network, such as a payments network, so they can go surf the web to get us the things we really need.”

This article was published in The Fintech Magazine Issue 34, Page 54-55