FinTech news in Checkout.com category

Checkout.com is building a full-stack payments company — it acts as a gateway, an acquirer, a risk engine and a payment processor

I asked Guillaume Pousaz if Checkout.com’s new valuation was similar to a 409A valuation update. It has implications when it comes to taxes as employees usually pay taxes on the difference between the price of their options and the new share value as defined by the new 409A valuation. Fintech startup Checkout.com was in the news this morning because the Financial Times reported that the payment company had slashed its internal valuation to $11 billion. Unlike Klarna’s down round, the new valuation wasn’t determined by a VC firm willing to invest in the company.

Co-founders Roberto Enrique Kafati Santos and Jose Maria Serrano started the company after a career at McKinsey leading digital payments for Kafati Santos and at delivery company JOKR for Serrano.

A few months after raising $1 billion, payments startup Checkout.com has announced that it plans to acquire French startup Ubble, which operates a remote identity verification service. When looking at digital identity verification startups, Checkout.com had a few criteria, such as accuracy, speed of decision, how many types of different frauds they can detect and how sophisticated it is. Following this acquisition, there could be some customers that start their relationship with Checkout.com through identity verification.

Toronto-based Sleek, which was part of Y Combinator summer 2021 batch, is developing a browser extension enabling one-click checkout and cash-back savings.

From the link, consumers go to a web page interface on top of the app and can make purchase choices from their favorite commerce site, including Shopify and Amazon, and pay with Apple Pay, Google Pay, Shop Pay or PayPal — features not often available because some social media sites don’t often play well with certain payment options, said Ownit co-founder and CEO Payman Nejati.

To underscore the demand for solutions to address this, today a startup called Wayflyer — which has built a new kind of financing platform, using big data analytics and repayments based on a merchant revenue activity — is announcing a big round of funding, $150 million. In terms of competitors, the size of the loans it typically makes, and the frequency — depending on the nature and size of the customer, loans could be made as frequently as monthly — has partly meant that Wayflyer doesn’t compete against, but complements, some of the other companies that have emerged as financiers to e-commerce businesses. E-commerce has continued to boom in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, but running an e-commerce business has also become significantly more chaotic, with unpredictable supply chains, logistics hiccups and overall higher costs upending even the best-laid plans. The company’s technology is a classic big-data play: It uses a number of sources of data, from Shopify and Woo Commerce through to TrustPilot reviews and Google Analytics and even wider information about how shipping services are performing, to determine how a merchant is doing as a business.

In discussing Bolt’s rise to total funding near the $1 billion mark, Breslow explained that the company operates in a space with competitors that are actually worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Checkout.com is building a full-stack payments company — it acts as a gateway, an acquirer, a risk engine and a payment processor.