Meet the man who owns a company worth $40bn – but still flies economy

Guillaume Pousaz is now one of Britain’s richest entrepreneurs, but he has no intention of flaunting his wealth.

His London-based payments company, Checkout.com, became the UK’s most highly-valued technology start-up last week, raising $1bn (£730m) from global investors at a $40bn valuation.

Swiss-born Pousaz’s own net worth has been estimated at as much as half of that, although he declines to confirm that figure - let alone spend it.

“The biggest risk that I see to my children is to change the way we live our life, for them to think that life is easy,” says Pousaz, who has lived in Dubai. He adds that his family will continue to fly economy on an upcoming ski trip.

“You want to stay normal, you want to stay humble. I grew up in Geneva, it’s the home of Calvinism. So we tend to be pretty down to earth people.”

Humble he might be trying to be, but the latest funding round means the 40-year-old is now one of the world’s 100 richest people, according to Forbes.

And investors are falling over each other for a piece of the company he has grown in just 10 years. The US giant Tiger Global, the asset manager Franklin Templeton and the wealth funds of Qatar and Singapore are among those backing Checkout.com.

Its $40bn valuation was almost three times that at which it raised money a year ago and saw it vault the neobank Revolut’s $33bn, as well as the majority of the FTSE 100.

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.”

Pousaz moved to Dubai to pursue business in the Middle East, although some of the company’s early customers were London’s fellow adolescent fintechs such as Revolut and Transferwise, who turned to the company rather than banks for payments.

“Quite quickly it made sense for some of the early fintech stars of the UK to associate with another fintech, instead of the bank that you’re fighting on a day-to-day basis,” he says. “If I want to take customers away from Barclays, it seems counterintuitive to go and process my cards at Barclaycard.”

Checkout.com's big break

The big break came six years later from Netflix. Checkout.com won a global search to be the streaming giant’s payments provider, which pushed Pousaz to raise funds for the first time. A first funding round in 2019 valued it at $2bn, meaning the company’s value has increased twenty-fold in less than three years.

Checkout.com is not alone in riding the payments boom. Silicon Valley’s Stripe, one of its biggest competitors, was valued at $95bn last year. Another, Adyen, has soared in value from €7.1bn (£5.9bn) to €55bn since going public in Amsterdam in 2018.

But unlike many highly-valued start-ups, Checkout.com is profitable. The company does not disclose financials, although it says transactions, from which it takes a cut, have tripled in each of the last three years and now amount to hundreds of billions of dollars. It has also grown to 1,700 employees across 19 countries.

Pousaz says the question of whether his company is overvalued is one for the investors that have backed him. “We don’t force anyone to invest that cheque, they choose to make the decision.

“[But] there are few industries that are bigger than payments. I’m not building an app for walking dogs in London. The total addressable market is nearly infinite and expanding. “Every single day, someone pays for coffee in cash. That’s an opportunity for me to turn it into a digital payment. And if you do research, most of the volume is sitting with the incumbents.”

The company’s success in clawing business away from those giants lies in faster and more modern technology: “We are more techfin than fintech.”

As he moves forward, Pousaz says there is no pressure from agitated investors to go public, since Checkout.com first raised money in 2019. The company has, however, been getting itself in shape for a float: “You get to a point where you’re going to have to go public because it’s the only exit for the investor.”

Pousaz has suggested that New York is the most likely destination, although he insists London remains a potential option. “I have an emotional attachment to the UK, I have 800 employees in London. But it’s going to be a rational decision, and that rational decision hasn’t been done. This is not a topic that we’re discussing on the board.”

He points out, however, that much of the recently-hired executive team is based in New York, including chief financial officer Céline Dufétel, who occupied the same role at the US-listed T Rowe Price.

Until a flotation does happen, Pousaz’s own fortune is also on paper and he allows himself few extravagances. His biggest expenditures are on a foundation dedicated to education that he and his wife are setting up in London, where his family is relocating to. The move has, however, been delayed by the pandemic and school entrance exams.

There is little time for surfing now: Pousaz keeps a punishing work schedule, although he declines to outline it, saying it would set a bad example to his company’s staff. Downtime is spent off screen, playing Risk with his three children.

Having started in Britain, much of the $1bn Checkout.com raised last week will fund an ambitious expansion into the US, the world’s biggest online shopping market. The territory-conquering board game might feel a little close to the day job.