This is despite Checkout.com being anything but a household name.
The company handles the back end payment processing for the likes of Netflix, Deliveroo and Sony, as well as many of London’s other “fintechs” and a large portion of the world’s cryptocurrency companies. You will rarely see its logo, and as far as Pousaz is concerned, the company is working when consumers don’t know it’s there.
“[Our customers] want fault free commerce. Five years ago you still had websites telling you when you pay, ‘Please don’t reload the page, it might take up to 30 seconds.’ We process a transaction in 200 milliseconds.
“Most people don’t realise that we have a real impact in society but our technology probably touches your credit card two or three times a day. We are a humble hardworking company with zero ego.”
Surfer makes waves
While Pousaz has the ambitious task of taking transactions away from the major banks and established payments companies such as Worldpay, he ended up in the industry by accident.
Having dropped out of university in Lausanne after his father’s death to pursue a life of surfing up and down the California coast, he ran out of funds and picked up a job at payments firm IPC. He quickly chose a life of entrepreneurship.
“I thought the opportunity was much bigger than the US only, on which they were exclusively focused,” Pousaz says. “I thought trying to do it myself would be better than doing it for somebody else.”
Two years after going it alone, in 2009, he spent $350,000 (£255,700) to acquire a small Mauritius-based company that had a licence to clear transactions through the Mastercard and Visa networks. That led to him setting up Checkout.com in London in 2012, the location a result of the Financial Conduct Authority’s embrace of financial technology companies.
Although the internet was well established by then, it was a very different landscape. “Amazon was a bookstore, Gmail barely existed, Instagram did not exist. The whole wave of ecommerce today started between 2010 and 2013. So in a way I would like to think I saw the opportunity early.”
