Good morning,
“I think 2023 is definitely going to be about payments efficiency and acceptance rates and optimization for the bottom line,” Céline Dufétel of Checkout.com, a London-based online payments company, told me.
Dufétel was promoted from CFO to president of the company last week; she'll retain her COO function. She is based in New York and leading the expansion into the U.S. to become a disruptor of legacy systems in the payments industry. Checkout.com plans to take on fintech competitors like Stripe. But meeting a challenge isn't something new to Dufétel. While studying applied mathematics, economics, and finance at the École Polytechnique in Palaiseau, France, she served in the French navy and was the only woman serving on a 200-person oil tanker.
Some of Checkout.com’s global customers include Sony, Alibaba, and the crypto exchange company Binance. In the U.S., Checkout.com has launched a partnership with GE HealthCare to standardize its global payments. Through a single API integration, the company can accept payments across all of its key markets, offering the local payment methods, according to Checkout.com.
GE HealthCare is an independent company following its recent spin-off from General Electric. “The digital layer is becoming more and more important in our industry,” GE HealthCare CFO Helmut Zodl told me in December.
Dufétel, who joined Checkout.com in August 2021, will keep the COO responsibilities under her umbrella, including all operational and go-to-market teams (like finance and marketing). While in her previous post—as COO and CFO of T. Rowe Price—she earned a spot on Fortune’s 2020 40 Under 40 list. Nirupam Sinha, SVP of corporate finance and strategy at Checkout.com, was promoted to CFO. Sinha, joined the company in November 2021, also coming from T. Rowe Price.
But fintechs have cooled off somewhat, at least in the eyes of investors. In early 2022, Checkout.com announced it raised $1 billion in its Series D funding round at a valuation of $40 billion. By the end of the year, the company reduced its internal tax valuation to around $11 billion. Similarly, Stripe, which was valued by private investors at $95 billion in 2021, cut the internal value of its shares by 28% in July.
“When you compare us to Stripe, the common point is both provide end-to-end proprietary technology, where you’ve got direct integration into local payment methods, as opposed to legacy incumbents that have been cobbled together through M&A,” Dufétel explains. And that has “created a very disjointed experience for merchants,” she says. But that's where the similarities end, as Checkout.com is focused on enterprise merchants, and "Stripe has its roots in the SMB [small and midsize business] world," Dufétel says.
In this macroenvironment, Checkout.com is providing services “we really think a CFO or a chief product officer needs right now,” Dufétel says. An example? “We give you much more transparency into the fees and help you remediate any declines,” she explains. And the company engages with merchants to proactively help them optimize their payments, she says. “If you think about very sophisticated, large enterprise clients, that's the kind of white-glove service that they're looking for,” Dufétel says.
Payment services provider Stripe is being watched closely at the moment. It’s reportedly in talks to raise new funding at a steep discount from its last valuation, Fortune reported. However, leadership change is on the horizon. Dhivya Suryadevara, CFO at Stripe since 2020, announced Feb. 2 in a LinkedIn post that she will step away from her role at the company to attend to family matters. As is the case with many tech companies, Stripe announced a round of layoffs in November, about 14% of its workforce.
Checkout.com has been building the marketing, sales, and customer success teams in the New York office, Dufétel says. Along with Dufétel, part of the finance, legal, and HR teams are also represented. “It takes time to hire and to train people, so it’s part of the multi-year effort,” she says.
In her new role, Dufétel is looking forward to continuing to drive growth for Checkout.com. She no longer wears a CFO hat, but her finance know-how is a mainstay.
See you tomorrow.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
