Ashley Paulus, VP of Revenue (UK & EEA) at Checkout.com: Checkout.com reached 78% growth in the UK and 60% in Europe

0:00Ashley Paulus:Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Europe show. I'm Seth Jorleson. Today I'm joined by Ashley. Ashley is the VP, Head of Revenue for the UK in EEA at Checkout. Checkout, phenomenal company, a company I've spoken about, a lot of me following very closely. Ashley, thank you for joining me. How are you doing? Hey, I'm doing well. Thank you very much for having me. It's great to chat. How's the job going? It's going well. It's really fun. As you mentioned, Checkout is growing really fast. It's a pretty cool company. I joined about seven years ago, actually, to launch our Southeast Asia business.

0:29So I was Asia-based for about 10 years. And a year ago, I moved to the UK to look after our UK revenue team. UK is our headquarters. It's kind of our home turf. And at the beginning of this year, I took over our European team as well. So now we were making a joke before, but truly Brexit be damned. It's UK and Europe together, looking after both regions, which have seen just phenomenal success over the last year. 78 % growth in the UK in 2025 year and year. And about 60 % growth in Europe. And it's only going to continue from here.

1:02Ashley Paulus:And where's that growth coming from? Yeah, it's coming from a few different places. So a lot of it's driven from our existing merchants and relationships. The UK, as I mentioned, is our headquarters. It was where we got one of our first acquiring licenses. And Europe was the second. So we've had longstanding bins there, longstanding PSP services. And so we have really great, strong relationships with our merchants. And those are only growing. So while we've seen a lot of growth from net new logos over the last few years, you would have seen eBay, you would have seen Spotify, you would have seen FreeNow, which are new merchants coming to us.

1:36We've also seen incredible growth from our existing merchants that we work with who are continuing to trust us with their revenue, pushing more of their volume to us, which obviously is helping us grow along with them.

1:47Ashley Paulus:And for those who don't know, maybe let's take a step back. When you talk about partners, Spotify, FreeNow, Vinted, what's in it for them? Why are they coming to checkout? Why are they partnering with you and the team? Yeah. So as I mentioned before, checkout, one of the world's eating PSP. So we are essentially the hidden rails behind the payment transaction. So the way I explain it to my mom, who obviously is a payments novice, is when you book an Uber, when you pay for your Spotify payment, when your Netflix subscription goes through, it's not Spotify or Netflix who are going into your account and pulling that money out.

2:22There's a layer in between. Obviously, that's checkout. So merchant acquiring is quite complex. We have the integration directly with the schemes with many different APMs, and then we provide those services and those rails to allow merchants to transact directly with their customers. So why do merchants tend to choose checkout? It's layered, obviously, but very large enterprise merchants tend to have a multi-acquirer strategy. So transparently, I don't know if Rory or Samuel will kill me for saying this, but we're oftentimes coming into a relationship with a merchant and we're not their first PSP that they've worked with, right?

2:55We are one of the newer players on the block. So we're almost never the incumbent. And so merchants are looking to us because they're genuinely looking to upscale their technology stack. They're looking for better acceptance rate. They're looking for more competitive acceptance rate, more fluid platforms that are able to offer different suites of products. And then also they oftentimes want to consolidate the many, many payments partners that they have so when you're looking for a partner you want someone who has breadth and scale and is able to service the regions where your customers are so we have over 30 acquiring licenses we are we have local and domestic teams that are really knowledgeable in those markets including across europe so we often tend to be a first point of call when merchants are are looking for more

3:37Ashley Paulus:sophisticated psps and how important is that scale piece like is that becoming increasingly important that be people that potential customers or merchants want to be able to have one single provider in all of their regions. I imagine it's really hard coverage to provide. How important is that? It's really important. I mean, if you are a human in your work, right, managing many different relationships, many different levels of service. And if you are providing online payments, then you obviously are a tech first business to a certain extent. So the more that you can consolidate those relationships, the easier.

4:13And the more that you can do that at a global scale, the easier it is. The world is becoming more and more globalized. We saw this accelerate post-COVID. We will continue to see this accelerate. And so merchants now want to access customers in every corner of the world. But to do that, they need to be able to offer them a payment suite that will allow them to access their customers, not just to provide car payments, but also APMs, wallets, allow their customers to pay where they want to pay. And then on the other side of that, so I speak often a lot about customers because that's who our merchants care about but as a merchant you also care about your treasury management you also care about your finances how are those settlements coming to you are you able to move those settlements between businesses and accounts so there is some optimization on the back end that again in a in a high interest environment become becomes really important for merchants that they have a partner who can go to the markets that they want and then also offer them back-end services that they need amazing and you mentioned

5:09Ashley Paulus:that I think last year you saw like 70, was it 78 % year-on-year growth in the UK and around 60 % in the EA. Great results. Super. What's great for this year? You know, are those the same targets that you're going for? You're thinking bigger. I mean, those are great. That level of growth is never going to be repeatable for every year of a business life. Are you looking to grow at that pace again? Or are you thinking, okay, if we can do 50%, that'd be amazing. So if you can call my CEO and let him know that this growth is not sustainable. But look, we saw really strong TPV growth. We saw 30 % of our revenue growth year on year.

5:46Last year, we were EBITDA positive. So again, we've made a lot of changes to our business over the last five years, I would say that we're really starting to see the big benefits from. We'll continue to grow. So we have very lofty ambitions. We continue to target 35 % growth year on year. I was saying to you earlier, I've been for the last few days at what we call our customer advisory board. So we bring just a few of our really strategic clients along with our product teams. And we just chat, right? Like we would talk about what's going on in the industry. We talk about what we're looking like.

6:17And when I think about the targets, the growth targets that we have that my team has, a lot of that will be driven by offering really innovative products that merchants need and want, and that often accelerate their growth, right? So if our merchants aren't growing their own businesses, if they're not able to offer solutions to their customers if they're not able to enter new geographies that they want to they're not going to be able to grow and then therefore we won't grow um i talk a lot about how um we are true revenue share right so our businesses our merchant successes is fully dependent on um our success and vice versa so we focus a lot on getting them the things that they need the products that they need um and then hopefully we'll continue to grow together amazing and when you look to that growth

7:00Ashley Paulus:do you have a personal strategy about it coming from net new merchants or do you think that there's a lot more to be had from your existing base it has to be both right so obviously our existing merchants will continue to grow with us as i mentioned before big enterprise merchants they have a multi-acquirer strategy and they they should right um when a psp is touching the revenue of your business this is the most important piece and so you you need to make sure you have redundancy you need to make sure you have optionality there. But we continue to win by win share of wallet, win more volume from our competitors by having really incredible service, by having really great product and acceptance rate.

7:39We spend a lot of time talking about acceptance rate optimization because even a few bips can translate into millions of dollars depending on your size and scale. So that's kind of table stakes on the back end. And we have an engine and an incredible account management team, which we're hiring for in Europe and the UK, which grow these relationships and these really deep partnerships with merchants. But obviously you need new merchants coming into the fold to be able to win that as well. So it is a balance of both, of winning those net new logos, making sure that we are partnering, again, with growing companies and industries, but then also taking care of the merchants on our back book as well.

8:15Ashley Paulus:And you're relatively new to the European and UK market. Yeah. You said your background was largely in Asia. how do two markets compare in terms of you know adoption and and overall sophistication sophistication in the payments world yeah there look before i moved to asia i was across east and west africa originally from the u.s so i've i've worked in a few different markets and then emerging markets um in singapore and malaysia singapore is much more of established market though they'd kill me if i said that they were emerging um but the southeast asian um environment is actually quite similar to Europe in the sense that it's very fragmented.

8:53While Europe is a bit more advanced, you guys have the euro, you guys have a shared currency, shared regulatory framework. In Southeast Asia, that doesn't exist, right? So each country has their own currency, their own central bank, their own banking systems, their own payment rails, their own levels of technology, technology adoption, very, very different economy sizes as well. So I think you actually spoke to Brian. I don't know if you have, but Brian Z, who leads our Southeast Asia business, he has a lot of challenges in front of him. But we've been in the APAC market for quite a few years, about six years now.

9:30And we're working with some really great brands out there. When I think of how that translates across into Europe, Europe has, as I mentioned, a lot of challenges, different countries, different central banking setups, different demands from different customers. I think a lot of people who go into Europe for the first time are actually quite shocked at how different Germany is as compared to France, as compared to Italy, right? The economies are different. The demands are different. The customer journeys and what they'll tolerate and accept are very different. But at the same time, there is a definite advantage in that it is a bit more unified and it's a bit easier to approach the bloc as a whole, although you really do need to tailor different country launches to the different markets.

10:14Ashley Paulus:Amazing. And one of the things I want to talk about is AI, right? You've had some interesting releases about AI. And, you know, in the UK and Europe, we're going through this really interesting transition is like fintechs, like Checkout, becoming these amazing, mature companies. And then we have this big AI disruption. And on one side, we're seeing a lot of the new generation of fintech companies be like AI Native or AI and fintech. How are you thinking about, how is Checkout more broadly thinking about making the most of this new technology in the world of, I guess, like a highly regulated, mature company and a mature space like payments?

10:55Yeah. So first, artificial intelligence, machine learning, that's actually been around for a while, right? So we've been using AI across some of our internal toolings and products for a long time. So we have something called intelligent acceptance, which uses AI and machine learning to increase the acceptance rate of every transaction. So we make sure that we're optimizing every transaction for things like issuer acceptance and issuer readiness, right? Will they accept the transaction if the CVV is not there, for example? Do they want to see the customer's name as last name, then first name, first name, then last name, right?

11:31As we were talking about Europe specifically, that will actually vary by market. So it's really important that you have a smart and intelligent tool that can apply that logic for the right market, for the right transaction, for the right card, for the right bank, all these different decision trees. So that's existed for a long time. But as a business, our AI adoption in the way that we're, sorry, it just started raining very heavily. The way that we're, oh, it's hailing actually. Welcome to Beaverbrook. But the way that we are using AI across all of our systems and platforms, I think obviously every one of our teammates is using AI.

12:09We're, as a business, very focused on that. What I think is more interesting actually is the way that we are using AI internally and then showing that tooling or those systems directly to our merchants. So, for example, we have an internal dashboard. And as I said, we've been using AI for a really long time. So we're using AI to track things like acceptance rate to see if we apply different rules, what would happen fraud? You know, what if we apply these rules across different fraud tools? And instead of just keeping that information to ourselves, we expose it to merchants in the dashboard. And so we're allowing them to create their own rules and logic and to play and see what would work.

12:42We also launched an AI powered like bot and assistance. So the customer support aspect about a year ago. So obviously we trained it on our own internal tools and trained it on the data that we had collected from merchants and the queries and the questions that they were asking the quickest way to resolution. And my team was telling me ahead of our call that our customer support bot has an 80 % CSAT score. So customer satisfaction score overall, which is sometimes higher than the actual human interactions that we have, although our customer support team is fantastic. but it's just so intuitive and so intelligent that it can understand you're this type of merchant you've asked this type of query in the past this is what you're asking and it gets you to that resolution a lot faster and you end up being a bit happier yeah that's really cool i've heard

13:28Ashley Paulus:similar things from other big businesses that actually yeah the agentic customer service is often better than human it's like the really complex cases and it's a great thing because then it frees up the the customer service team to actually focus on the more complex cases and to provide more dedicated time to the complex issues. What about in your role in GTM? Are there AI tools, other ways of leveraging AI in your job that may not apply to checkout more broadly, but as somebody who's focused on revenue growth? Yeah, so what's really interesting is last year when the adoption of AI started a lot faster and we started having access to a lot more tooling internally, it was really cool to see salespeople.

14:14So the teams I look after are solutions engineers who naturally had been leaning into AI and agentic for a really long time. So they were using this to build demos. They build really cool integrations. They are building websites and microsites for customers really, really quickly. So obviously my technical account management team, my engineering team, they are already taking off, right? And then the next question was, okay, what about the business development reps, the account managers, the sales teams? How are they going to adopt this? From a sales perspective, I think the first step is ensuring that we are using AI to address the right customers in the right way.

14:52So pulling as much information as possible, making sure that the conversations that we're having are with the relevant people, with the relevant products. That's the best use of AI for us today. I don't know if you receive a lot of AI generated outreach. I receive probably five or six AI generated emails every day. And so this isn't necessarily the space that my team is leading into. We've all kind of agreed, you know, this isn't, this doesn't feel natural, and it's not getting the right result. um so instead we're using this more as an education piece to ensure that um we can know as much about a merchant and their business and their objectives and their pain points as quickly as possible so that when we do finally get on the phone with them and we do finally reach out and start that conversation it's relevant to them right we're not wasting anyone's time yeah yeah it's interesting

15:39Ashley Paulus:it's that that was the first exciting thing was like ai outbound no there were all these companies and everyone's like ah and everyone I speak to now is like avoid stop it yeah stop it yeah there and even um even sometimes my teams will be like all intentionally do a um like a spelling mistake or leave some sort of grammatical error so they know it's it's like actually a human reaching out uh and I find that very interesting yeah that's super interesting because as I say with my content it's like when I make posts on LinkedIn some people be like oh there's a typo in there and I'll be like honestly typos are they're better right because it just shows like a small type people are quite forgiving.

16:16Ashley Paulus:People are not so forgiving if they think that you're using AI and you're sort of tricking them. Sorry, go ahead. No, no, no. I think you're exactly spot on. Again, it was so interesting being in this room with so many of our merchants talking about AI. And we talk a lot about agentic commerce. And I'm no luddite, right? I'm very big on agentic and fully see a future where a large percentage of global transactions will be agentic powered. but it's at the beginning of the hype cycle around agentic commissary transitioning a bit to agentic we had everyone was like oh this is mckinsey was like it's going to be 50 of transactions by 2027 you know everybody get ready this is happening and what i'm hearing a lot in the room is merchants saying look we want to be able to expose our transactions we want to be able to use this but actually not in the way that you thought right agentic to us looks like leveraging our own data, leveraging our own information, servicing our customers in a smarter way.

17:10And that obviously varies if they're a subscription business, a retail business, a service provider, right? It's very different across the board. But I think even with AI as a business, AI as a sales team, how we use it today will look very different to how we'll use it in the future. And the speed at which this is iterating is what makes it really interesting.

17:29Ashley Paulus:It's a fool's errand to try and predict, isn't it? especially those big consultancies have always got a hard job trying to forecast exactly what what impacts the technologies will have they're bullish you know i love that they're bullish yeah for sure but to your point you never end up using the technology in the way that people expect it literally right and the end users find their own ways of of evolving and using the technology we've got two minutes left i want to ask what is it what does the future look like what does the next 12 months look like you know you're speaking a bit about agentic commerce you're doing interesting stuff in stable coins yeah what's the focus for next 12 months what's the big thing look the the stable coin piece i i would be remiss if i didn't speak on this i um have lived many lives at checkout and my my role before i moved into um the uk team was looking after our crypto merchants on the back book side so i i really love that space and stable coin is is this is just the perfect time for it right um the regulatory environment has finally caught up we are ready to accept this, we're seeing a lot more demand from merchants.

18:32And this is really an exciting time for stablecoin as we're able to offer that across the board. You'll hear more from us in the coming months of what this looks like. But the big focus for us, especially in a high interest rate environment, is giving merchants access to their capital faster. As I said before, if our merchants are doing well, we are doing well. And if they're able to access their capital, if they're able to leverage that and deploy that in a smarter way than holding it up in a bank as they wait for settlement on Monday for all of their weekend transactions. We're trying to allow that.

19:04So this is stablecoins, I think is really exciting. Obviously, agentic, understanding what our role is there, listening to our merchants, understanding what they need from us there is a really exciting play for us. And then again, just kind of doubling down on what we do really, really well. so card payments the APMs the acceptance rate optimization the cost optimization the white glove service that we offer our clients that's really our our bread and butter so we are spending a large portion of our time just kind of ring fencing that and making sure that we continue to deliver just a world-class experience to all of our merchants amazing well

19:40Ashley Paulus:you and the team are crushing it it feels like checkouts been going from strength to strength in the last few but the last couple of well in the last six months it feels like every few weeks There's another partnership announcement, the profitability. We're moving. The new valuation. It's been pretty nonstop. Well, look, best of luck with 2026. I'm sure you're going to absolutely crush it. And it's great to chat. Yeah, cheers. Lovely speaking with you, Seb. Thanks again for having me. My pleasure. Bye-bye. Bye.