Checkout.com

Guillaume Pousaz founded Checkout.com in London with a clear diagnosis: the payments infrastructure available to large enterprises was fundamentally unfit for purpose. Legacy processors were engineered for average transaction volumes, not for the specific demands of a platform like Netflix or Uber Eats that processes billions of transactions across dozens of currencies, requires near-perfect approval rates, and needs granular real-time data on every payment event. Checkout.com was built from scratch to serve those requirements — with proprietary technology designed for speed, reliability, and data transparency at enterprise scale. The central challenge in large-scale payment processing goes well beyond accepting credit cards. It means maximizing authorization rates — every declined transaction is lost revenue — managing fraud in real time, navigating different regulatory requirements in each market, providing actionable data on every individual transaction, and maintaining uptime that approaches 100 percent. These demands require infrastructure purpose-built for the job, not standardized solutions bolted together. Checkout.com responded by building the entire technology stack in-house: from the payment gateway and fraud detection engine to direct connections with banking networks. This vertically integrated approach enables consistently higher approval rates than competitors can achieve, lower latency, and the kind of detailed payment data that clients use to refine their checkout flows and optimize revenue. The business model is straightforward: B2B fee-per-transaction, charging a percentage or flat rate on each payment processed. The client roster is a testament to the company's enterprise positioning — Netflix, Vinted, Temu, Uber Eats, eBay, and ASOS are among the global platforms that rely on Checkout.com's infrastructure to manage their payment flows worldwide. The company has remained private throughout its growth, and that growth has been among the fastest in European fintech — reaching a peak valuation above 40 billion dollars almost entirely through organic expansion driven by product quality and enterprise customer satisfaction. In a business where trust is the primary currency, the ability to count the world's most recognized brands as active references is the deepest competitive moat Pousaz could have built.