Checkout.com was built into a powerhouse in electronic payments by Guillaume Pousaz, who is now well-positioned to make a fortune in the IT industry.
By founding a rising star in electronic payments, a college dropout from Switzerland earned a $14 billion fortune and rose to become one of the richest people in the nation.
Checkout.com, whose founder and CEO is Guillaume Pousaz, raised money last year at a valuation of $40 billion, making it more valuable than British telecommunications giant Vodafone Group Plc. However, during its early years, his organization also received business from clients Pousaz prefers to avoid mentioning: porn and gambling websites.
From the United States, where he pursued a passion for surfing and had his first taste of the payments industry, to Singapore, where he created Checkout’s precursor while still in his 20s, his journey to build one of Europe’s most valuable startups circled the globe.
According to documents, the 41-year-old currently resides in Dubai with his wife and three children and owns 60% of Checkout. In addition to owning the London-based business, the entrepreneur also runs a recently established family office that has made investments in fintech firms, positioning him as a technology rainmaker in the area.
In the fintech space, he’s looked upon as someone who can show people that building a company and scaling it to this size is possible, said Gerard Grech, chief executive officer of UK industry group Tech Nation.
Pousaz, a former snowboarder who made appearances in sports magazines, is a supporter of cryptocurrencies and Web3, a loose collection of technologies aiming at decentralizing the internet. He dismisses the ability of conventional banks to compete in the realm of e-commerce.
Pousaz, a tall, lean man with piercing blue eyes, boasts cockily about Checkout’s transformation from a back-room store to an integral part of the web’s financial infrastructure. His business, which aspires to go public in the future, boasts that it has received support from high-profile clients like Netflix Inc. and venture funding from well-known companies like Tiger Global, and that it is avoiding riskier porn clients.
Investors are believing in our ability to build a very large business in what is essentially one of the largest total addressable markets, Pousaz told Sky News in January. We have the savoir faire and the technology to beat traditional banks in electronic payments.
He uses his influence on larger companies to criticize rivals like Stripe Inc. and Adyen NV. He claimed in a TechCrunch interview from 2020 that Checkout is known internally as “the Stripe graduation program” due to its emphasis on large corporations rather than smaller businesses, which make up the majority of Stripe’s clientele.
However, there have been indications of developing pains lately. About 100 employees, or about 5% of the workforce, will be let go by Checkout. Separately, the business fired a number of workers earlier this year as a result of harassment claims connected to an off-site trip to Cyprus.
Also leaving are key executives. According to a Checkout spokesperson, Chief Revenue Officer Nick Worswick left by mutual agreement in July. Worswick chose not to respond.
As it seeks to grow, the corporation has also been bolstering itself in speculative markets. As of January, more than half of Checkout’s payments volume were made using fintech and cryptocurrencies. Since then, transactions on several cryptocurrency trading platforms have decreased along with a general decline in the value of digital currencies.
Pousaz, a Geneva native, started his studies in mathematical engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne with the intention of becoming an investment banker. After learning that his father had pancreatic cancer in 2005, he dropped out of school in his final year and moved to California primarily for surfing.
He began working for a US payments processing company in 2006, and the following year he launched NetMerchant, a money transfer service.
With the money he received from that, he purchased Mauritius-based SMS Gateway in 2009, which served as the foundation for the Singapore-based business Opus Payments.
An agreement Opus made with the Chinese e-commerce site Dealextreme in 2011 gave the business a boost, enabling it to become profitable and fund growth. After getting an operating license a year later, Opus changed into Checkout and moved its headquarters to the UK.
In 2018, Checkout bagged Netflix as its first high-profile customer. Even while the contract, usual for the payments sector, was just for a portion of the streaming service’s revenue, it was an important validation and solidified Checkout’s position in the eyes of investors.
The next year, the company’s initial investment round was closed with a $2 billion valuation.
However, in its early years, Checkout worked with clients that offered adult-only services including gambling and pornography, which at one point represented a considerable portion of business, according to persons with knowledge of the situation.
According to the sources, the clientele included businesses like OnlyFans Ltd., MondoCamGirls, and MindGeek SARL, which operates websites like Pornhub.com that allows users to purchase live feeds of explicit content.
Pousaz has described Checkout’s early years as “scrappy,” although he denies making a significant amount of money from adult websites. He referred to claims of a dependence on porn sites as “quite annoying” in an interview with Sifted in 2020, an online news site about European entrepreneurs.
From our early years, adult content and gambling were immaterial contributors to Checkout’s overall processing volumes, revenue, growth and success, a company spokesperson said. Checkout has since exited adult content entirely, serving no merchants in this category.
