Trust is fundamental to payments.

Gaining and maintaining trust in the payments ecosystem has always been challenging, but it becomes increasingly difficult as the industry rapidly advances and innovates. How does our trust model evolve when we move from a world where consumers are always virtually or physically present to make a purchase to a new world where robots are doing their bidding?

In this episode of Payments on Fire, Chris Uriarte welcomes Jenny Hadlow, Chief Operating Officer, and Rory O’Neill, Chief Marketing Officer, from Checkout.com to discuss the findings from their recent report “Trust in the Digital Economy 2025” and explore the interesting dimensions of trust that merchants, consumers, and service providers need to be aware of in today’s ever changing digital economy.

 

 

 

 

Chris Uriarte: Welcome to Payments on Fire. I’m Chris Uriarte, a partner at Glenbrook and I’m glad to have you with us today. But before I get to the meat of today’s episode, I have two questions for you.

The first leads us to a bit of a shameless plug, but an important one for our listeners in the payments industry. Have you recently been to one of our famous Glenbrook Partners Payments Boot Camps? If you haven’t, or if it’s been a while, I want to let you know that we’re having a live virtual Payments Boot Camp coming up on March 10th through March 12th. So if you’ve made a commitment to your professional development in 2026, this is a great way to get smart about the payments industry. Just head to our website, glenbrook.com. Register before February 10th for a 10% discount.

The second question gets to the crux of today’s podcast and is a simple one. Do you trust me? Now, as Glenbrook Partners has been helping guide the payments industry for, believe it or not, coming up on 25 years, and we’re quickly approaching our 300th podcast episode, perhaps you do trust us to provide you with the latest information and trends in payments, which is probably why you’re listening today.

But the importance of trust in the payments industry goes well beyond selecting your favorite podcast host and it’s fundamental and foundational for everything in payments and the banking industry to work.

To put it simply, when consumers and businesses lose trust in the system, it fails. Gaining and maintaining trust in the payments ecosystem has always been challenging, but it becomes increasingly difficult as payments evolves and innovates. This past year has introduced some incredibly new paradigms in innovations in payments, and agentic commerce was most certainly at the top of the list of hot topics in 2025.

But how does our trust model evolve when we move from a world where consumers are always virtually or physically present to make a purchase to a new world where robots are doing their bidding? And how do we ensure that we maintain trust between all parties as the industry continues to innovate so quickly?

On today’s episode, we chat with the team from Checkout.com about these interesting dimensions of trust that merchants, consumers, and service providers need to be aware of in today’s ever changing digital economy.

And so with all that being said, I am delighted today to be joined by our guest from Checkout.com, Jenny Hadlow, the company’s Chief Operating Officer, and Rory O’Neill, Checkout’s Chief Marketing Officer. Jenny, Rory, welcome to Payments on Fire. How are you today?

Jenny Hadlow: Good. Thank you, Chris, so much for having us.

Chris Uriarte: Great to have you guys with us today as we kick off the new year here. I think maybe some great timing on some of these topics as we’ve just come out of the holiday season and are starting to kind of add up some of the sales that we’ve seen around the holiday time. We’ve heard some good things from retailers closing out the end of the year.

So really excited to talk about some of these topics. But let’s first talk about Checkout. So Checkout’s been around for a while, I know the company has some pretty significant global reach. But I think it’s the first time we’ve welcomed Checkout here onto Payments on Fire. So for our listeners around the world who might not be very familiar with Checkout.com, give us a little bit of a background about the company.

Jenny Hadlow: Absolutely. Checkout.com is a global digital payments platform and we power thousands of businesses that shape the digital economy. We focus on digitally native brands, and we work with over a thousand enterprise merchants globally. That includes some of the category leaders and brands we all know and love and probably shopped with over the holiday season, like eBay, Uber, Pinterest, Vinted, Klarna, HelloFresh. We operate across 56 countries with local acquiring. We process billions of dollars every year across 145 currencies. We’re incredibly global as a company. We have 19 offices around the world. And as we close out 2025, we’re really excited to share that we processed over 300 billion in total payments volume.

That was a 70% year over year increase in volume growth on our core commerce and fintech business. So to your point, a great way to start the new year here on the Payments on Fire podcast. So thank you for having us.

Chris Uriarte: And you’re very welcome. Great to have you guys here. And I think one of the things that’s unique about Checkout is your focus is 100% online, 100% digital. Is that right?

Jenny Hadlow: That’s correct.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah. So that’s great differentiation, I think, and it shows really where your focus is, particularly in relation to some of the areas that we’re going to talk about today.

But since both of you are new to the podcast, we kind of have a standard question that we love to ask folks here is, we all know none of us went to school to study payments, so we all want to know how you kind of got into this crazy industry here and would love to hear a little bit about both your backgrounds.

Rory O’Neill: So I came in through the consumer electronics world. I actually came in through mobile phones, if I’m really honest. I was 15 years or so in consumer electronics and one of my last gigs was to help Samsung Pay roll out in Europe.

It was just so obvious. We were doing such amazing things with our phones, but we’d never really automated this thing called our wallets and for how we paid with them. So around that time it was very, it felt like the birth of the mobile industry was happening again. It was just so obvious that payments and phones and all these kind of digital technologies would be connected.

So I was desperate to get into payments, and found a small business that was in niche retail and hospitality called Planet. Worked with Planet for five years, then sold that business to Advent International. And then was really fortunate to get a gig at Checkout.com and help the team position in enterprise payments for the digital world.

Chris Uriarte: Great. So you came through the mobile route, which, out of nowhere, did we ever dream that all of us would actually be in a place where we could just carry around our phones and make payments every day. But look where we are today. It’s pretty incredible. And Jenny, how about yourself?

Jenny Hadlow: Similar to Rory, I can’t say that I set out to work in payments or even in fintech, but man, am I so happy that I ended up here. My background was in Software as a Service. Before Checkout, I spent 11 years at a New York-based SaaS company called Yext. We were doing very early days SEO optimization, digital presence management, early days of APIs with Google around their Maps product, and Bing and Yahoo and all of these sites we don’t even talk about anymore.

But I think what brought me and attracted me to payments was the business I was in before was really core infrastructure for the internet. It was plumbing for the internet back in the day when we were talking about digital presence and maps and all of that really critical work that you used on your smartphones when it first came out.

And when I saw payments, I saw something really similar in that. It is infrastructure and it is plumbing for the economy. Not just the internet, the global economy that we operate in now. And I was super attracted to just how tangible and how critical that technology is. And that’s what brought me here.

What keeps me here is the depth of technical expertise that I have to learn every single day, the amazing people and payments nerds that we get to interact with at Checkout and across the broader industry. And I’ve just been like so blown away by not just getting into fintech, but into payments in particular, I think is one of the best places to be in fintech.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah, I think the thing that you bring up is something that we always joke about here at Glenbrook is that really every company is a payments company at the end of the day, right? Whether you’re accepting payments, whether you’re a payment service provider, whether you’re paying somebody. Payments really does creep into the business of every single business. So that’s why we like it here and that’s what keeps us employed. So we’re a big fan of the industry for sure.

And I think today is kind of interesting though because very often on this podcast we are in sort of what I would call the nitty gritty of payments, operations, optimization, maybe some of the trends in payments, et cetera. And we’re going to certainly talk about a lot of that stuff today. But one thing that we’re going to focus on today is something that I think we all know is very, very important to the payments world, of course, to banking, to financial services. In fact, I would consider it something that’s absolutely foundational and sort of a prerequisite for any of these industries to function.

And that topic that we’re going to talk about today is trust, right? We know that trust is critical for our banking sector, that if people don’t trust banks, it generally leads to some type of systematic failure. And we know that trust is critical for the payments industry. If we lose trust in a payment system, in a payment type, then users of that system just generally won’t use it, right?

But the importance of trust is really becoming something more and more important in people’s everyday lives as really every aspect of our lives becomes more and more digital. So before we really get into the meat of some of the great work that you guys have been doing that we’re going to highlight today, I would love to hear from each of you, sort of your personal perspective on why you think trust is such an important thing to the digital economy today.

Rory O’Neill: I mean, not to be very grandiose, but as you said in your lead in there, I think that trust is fundamental to commerce. Without trust in the system, there actually is no commerce. And when the world first went online and we first started doing digital shopping, the brilliant minds at Visa, Mastercard, and around the world, the brilliant minds in the payment industry had to replicate the trust that we all felt when we got a physical card out of our wallet, put it in the machine, tapped in a PIN code or whatever, or did a mag stripe and purchased the goods in store. Because there was a lot of trust in that system because we could physically see it. And we had to replicate that in the digital world.

And I think it’s amazing now to see some of the consumer research or stats that come out of that, that nearly 70% of consumers, when they shop online, sellers they trust is a direct influence, right? In terms of loyalty, consumers are 2.5 times more likely to shop again with the same merchant if they trust that merchant, even if they find something at a lower price.

Trust is equating to revenue and as you said, all payments lead to revenue, right? So four out of five consumers will only buy from brands they trust, or every failed transaction is losing revenue. But it’s also losing brand trust because most consumers will not go back to a merchant if a payment fails.

So I think that trust is actually even beyond the foundation of digital commerce. Trust is just, if there is no trust, there is no digital commerce. It really is that absolute and that dramatic.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah, it absolutely is. And in particular, as we see emerging technologies continue to evolve in the payments world in particular, the trust issue becomes even more important, right? Because we’re essentially reinventing ourselves in the payments world. And I think consumers continuously ask themselves whether they could trust this new technology, they could trust this new brand, they could trust the company that’s providing these services, et cetera.

So while maybe we’ve seen maturity occur over the course of the last 10 to 15 years over digital commerce, e-commerce, et cetera, with major brands establishing themselves as trusted players in this space, I think we’re seeing a bit of a change now, right? We’re seeing new paradigms, we’re seeing new companies, new players enter the space.

And I think, as you’re saying, this really forces us to highlight the trust proposition that each of these organizations brings to consumers, and it’s probably more important than ever today.

Jenny Hadlow: I think you’re spot on. I think what you and Rory are highlighting in terms of how trust has evolved around payments and how it’s gone from physically issued cards to where we are today, the new vehicles and ways that people pay. I think what’s been so interesting to me, coming into payments in the past five years and at a very global scale, so having lived in the US and the UK, traveling all over and doing payments all over with all of the payment methods we work with, what I’ve realized is that some of the newer technology around payments is actually so much more secure than it ever was with a physically issued card.

But there’s this inherent dynamic of trust because I don’t understand it, and the newness of it, when actually your trust in some of these new payment vehicles and how payments are done, whether it be virtual cards, whether it be tokens, whether it be QR codes on your phone, actually have so much technology and security behind it.

And so I think it’s one part education and one part sort of habits that we need to help both merchants and consumers with, how digital payments work now and how they’re going to work in the future, to help really build that trust. But I’ve been really impressed by what I’ve seen from everyone in the ecosystem, from schemes to players like Apple and Google to PSPs like Checkout.com, and the amount of technology and security that goes behind this new technology.

Chris Uriarte: So I think you’re highlighting something really interesting, which is there’s different significant influencers of trust, right? So if I’m a consumer, I might have a specific sentiment of trust for a brand or technology, perhaps based on maybe a bad experience that’s occurred, because you were defrauded or something along those lines.

But perhaps my perception is just informed by the fact that I don’t really understand how this works, right? And to me, it seems like it’s sort of a big issue today when we’re talking about a lot of these emerging technologies. So education is probably a big thing that we have to think about in the industry as we continue to evolve and innovate with these new technologies.

So I think that’s really a great point and I think that’s a great setup to this research that you’ve been doing over the course of the past year, which, I have to say, when I looked at it, first thought this is pretty significant, both in what you’ve done, both the output of the research and also the scale of it.

So you’ve recently completed a research project, which is called Trust in the Digital Economy 2025, which examines how trust shapes consumer behavior in the digital economy. And I have to say that the scale, as I said, is pretty impressive. It’s using a combination of survey data, interviews, and some proprietary network data that you have at Checkout.

So why don’t you tell us a little bit more about this project and how you went about and some of the things that you found.

Rory O’Neill: Yeah, happy to Chris. First of all, it was a global survey. We actually went to 16 different markets around the globe because we wanted to compare how different consumers in different markets actually had the perspectives on this great topic of trust.

So we reached 18,000 respondents, and combined that, as you said, with some of the Checkout proprietary data on our network. And we were looking at not just how people pay, but what shapes their behavior, what shapes their expectations, and then also looking at willingness to try some of the new technologies that you and Jenny have mentioned.

And we kind of like organized the report into three buckets. There’s today’s digital economy is like how consumers live, how they spend, what they’re willing to kind of earn online, even those kind of pieces. Then there’s like trust at the checkout moment. Where does the role of payments really shape that sort of trust equation. And then we also looked at the future of trust too, right?

Obviously in the birth of 2025, it might have been the birth of the agentic commerce, Chris, as we’ve talked about many times, right? So I think we wanted to make sure that we were going on about understanding how the role of AI and identity might shape that, the innovation of how people might think about trust in the future.

And look, the summary of the report that we kind of got to is, very quickly we could see these major themes coming out that trust is the leading driver of customer loyalty, right? It’s way ahead of price, it’s even now way ahead of convenience. Great price transparency, price visibility, and convenience is expected now when you shop online. It’s that moment of payment and what happens when that little like spinning hour glass happens. And the drama behind that is actually like really driving that key component of trust.

42% of consumers say that when a failed payment happens, they’re just not going to return to the brand. That’s a staggering number. And like 40% will report that they’ll abandon their cart if they feel like something’s getting in the way, like there’s a screen popping up that shouldn’t pop up or potentially something feels clunky on that last little bit of the payment journey or last little bit of the consumer journey.

And that, on the positive side, like 73% said that smooth payment experience is the sign that a brand is trustworthy, right? So, to the point you said earlier, all companies are in payments because everybody has to get payments to get to revenue. Everyone has to get to revenue to get to profit. And everyone has to get to profit to get to cash.

It’s amazing how important this payments part has become, that if it doesn’t work properly and doesn’t work like completely invisibly, it can break not just revenue, but breaks loyalty and breaks long term brand trust. And that’s a pretty serious business equation, right?

Chris Uriarte: It’s very much a truth though, right? I think about like yesterday morning, I was making a purchase online. I was using my phone through the mobile web browser and it was just a small purchase with a brand that I had never bought anything from before. And the checkout experience was really just terrible.

It was one of those experience where there were some fields that were kind of off the page a little bit and I couldn’t quite enter the details cleanly in there. I had to kind of manipulate the browser a little bit. And the first thing that kind of goes through my head when you experience that is like, is this a legitimate business? Is this a real business?

If they haven’t put the time and the effort to optimize this very, very basic and really, really important part of the experience, like them getting paid at the end of the day, then what does that say about their business or their products or that sort of thing? So I certainly relate of course, to some of those numbers.

I find the approach here really interesting. We will dig deeper into some of the things that you found in the study, but first thing that came to my head is this is a really interesting angle for a provider like Checkout.com to take and to invest in this type of research. So I’m curious as to what was the motivation for Checkout to undertake research like this?

Jenny Hadlow: If you think about Checkout is in the business of trying to service the largest enterprise brands around the world. What you just described in terms of a poor payment experience, ironically, some of those are coming from the payments companies that have been in the industry the longest amount of time.

And so when you talk about trust and trust in established brands, what I always tell our prospects when I interact with them is, I’d love for you to choose Checkout, but my only ask of you is that you choose one of the digitally native PSPs, right? Because you have to be working with a company that cares about all of the things we just talked about and gives you the best opportunity in technology and presentation that you just described, that your checkout experience is truly frictionless.

We also then engage with our merchants on so many elements of payment performance, fraud rates, I know you come from a background, Chris, in fraud and risk, and conversion rates, and how do they manage costs. But at the end of the day, as we’re talking about, those are bottom of the funnel metrics, and we have to be educating our merchants on top of the funnel. How do they even get them to the place where they transacted and how can we really help our merchants grow their revenue?

Because that’s what we care about most is that if merchants are successful, we’re successful. So there’s so much value in the work that Rory and team and all of Checkout did in going, Hey, let’s lift up. Let’s think about how do we get a merchant to that checkout experience, and how can we help you optimize all the way through?

Chris Uriarte: Right, that makes a lot of sense. And you talk about metrics. And there are so many different metrics, there are so many different KPIs in this payments world today. I mean, my colleague Drew Edmond, for our loyal listeners, probably a lot of you were listening to Drew’s series on payments optimization in summer of last year. And we consistently talk about metrics and KPIs, metrics and KPIs.

And obviously KPIs are things that I feel like you could kind of feel and you could touch. They’re numbers, right? You can look at volume growth, you can look at fraud rates, growth in fraud, reduction in fraud, and much, much more. But trust is kind of an interesting one, right? Because it’s not really something that is easy to measure, right? You just can’t count it, you can’t touch it, you can’t put it on a scale. You can’t, in most instances, kind of observe it with your two eyes.

So where do you even start when it comes to quantifying levels of trust in this really complex economy, this digital economy that’s changing every day, and what are some of the challenges in doing so in the digital world?

Rory O’Neill: It’s quite right, Chris. No one can see trust. It’s not something you can physically see, but we all experience, I guess, the outcome of behaviors when it’s not there. It’s almost like a null experiment, in that sort of thing. So, so look, you’re right.

There’s a ton of proxies that we can get to. Everyone knows there’s cart abandonment, there’s retries after failures, there’s looking at repeat purchases, and then even right the way down to, as you and Jenny were saying, around conversion rates and payment acceptance rates and all those kind of hardcore metrics.

And I think payment professionals have been looking at those for years, right. And I think that the use of AI and optimizations of how we look at that and how we get the data around that is quite advanced and quite brilliant these days. Many of the merchants we work with, when we want to win more business with them, we have to convince the machines that the algorithms are going in our favor and we have to perform in that way. So I think that the payments industry has done a really, really brilliant job at that.

The other end of the equation, we had this wonderful thing called search at the beginning of the digital world. And the wonderful thing about search was we kind of knew what consumers were looking for and we could see what words were tracking and we could see what pages they were going to, and we could actually find people into funnels.

And we all optimized our web experience to make sure that the right words were being placed in the right places, so people would come to our websites. And then we optimized our websites based on the conversion flows and whether it was pictures, or whether it was dynamics, or whether it was UX, we all optimized for conversion. So we had a lot of data around it.

I think one of the challenging, I’m sure we’ll get into it in a second, is now that the world of search might move into a world of LLM discovery, then the principles of trust and the principles of commerce might change a bit. Because it doesn’t matter how good your website looks anymore because there’s a machine that’s scanning it.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah.

Rory O’Neill: And now maybe the fundamentals of, you know, the good old fundamentals of e-commerce, which is like price, SKU availability, logistics, shipping, return policy. Maybe that’s much more interesting to a machine.

I don’t worry about, as we said, I don’t worry necessarily about the lower funnel transaction thing. I think the payments industry is brilliant there. I think they’ve optimized that fantastically. I worry about how we get the trust at the much earlier in the discovery phase for brands.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah, so you’re hitting on something that I brought up on one of our episodes earlier this year, which I think is really, really interesting and I’m just going to essentially re-summarize what you said, which is we’ve spent the last 20 years optimizing for the user experience, but now are we going to be in a world where we need to start also optimizing for the agent experience for this machine, for this bot, for this robot, for all of a sudden that is front ending purchases on behalf of consumers. So it’s absolutely a very different world.

And we’ll talk a little bit more about this when we get a little deeper into agentic in just a second, but I really like what you said though, Rory, about how user behavior and user outcomes is really an interesting thing to look at here and to maybe as a starting point to try to tie that to what user perceptions are with trust and things along those lines.

But back to everything you said, I mean, how does all of this actually translate into actionable insights for somebody like a merchant?

Rory O’Neill: I would go right back to, I think there’s the payment performance, like it’s reducing failed payments, how are we using AI and all those kind of things to present the right payments options. I’m sure Jenny can take us through in a second, but the. so there’s kind of definitely a layer all around performance.

I think there’s a, what is a wonderful word in our industry around frictionless and how the clarification of recognizable branding and trusted cues in that process can help a lot. Like if you signpost things, then I think that that’s certainly a way to not lose a consumer through it.

And then the last bit is probably consistency, right? How many websites do we go to where the web experience is different to the mobile experience or you have a different experience if you’re on one geo or a different experience if you’re in different geo? All those kind of like pragmatic things that merchants can do to look at that, optimizing journey across the complexities of how the consumer may access their different touchpoint, I think is a really critical thing.

Because look, at the end of the day, Chris, we talk about, in the industry, we talk about the payment experience a lot. We talk about our journeys and all this kind of things. The reality is no consumer likes to pay for anything, particularly not me. And nobody smiles when they get their credit card out of their wallet and puts it on an in on online browser. Nobody smiles when that happens, even though you see it on lots of payment providers websites, right?

So I think we’ve got to make sure that our industry at its best is invisible at the moment is used. And there’s a whole host of tech that makes that process as invisible as possible. So any insights we take is right the way across those measures. Performance, transparency, consistency, it’s like how invisible are we making this as we go through that journey?

Chris Uriarte: It is funny when you see how this is perceived from a user perspective. You’re right that nobody’s ever happy to pay at the end of the day when the bill comes. But when you look at all the advertising that’s out there today, particularly here in the US, you always see lots of happy consumers that seem to be very happy to pay a hundred dollars to get about 10 cents worth of airline miles at the end of the day.

It’s funny how that’s positioned out to the market. Jenny, what’s your take on this?

Jenny Hadlow: We do talk a lot about the experience being invisible and frictionless and you’ll probably have picked up, I’m Chief Operating Officer, but my roots were in commercial and I still spend a ton of time with our merchants. And I think at the end of the day, we’re super customer first and what we see from our merchants is just what we’re describing here.

So Chris, your experience of landing on an under optimized mobile page where you had to manually key in on your tiny little iPhone, your long digit card number, we are seeing a whole other experience surface with one of our products called Flow, which is a checkout hosted payments page, mobile optimized, web optimized, seamless if it goes through. We then offer on top of this a product called Remember Me, which basically allows users to be remembered by the merchants that they visit more frequently and it has a network effect.

And if we play through that exact example, if you were to land on that page and they know who you are and you don’t have to enter a card number and you go through security checks instead of entering a long digit card number and not even knowing what wifi you’re using, wherever you’re connected, we have made both the experience so much less friction full, but also putting all those trust cues in there, if that makes sense.

And a customer that we have, Zbooni, it’s a Dubai based e-commerce company that’s really interestingly sitting at the intersection of commerce and social media is seeing these results. 70% faster checkout for returning users, 12.5% uplift on acceptance rates, and their chargeback rates are unbelievably low. And so we’re seeing this technology and, as I said, more sophisticated payments technology, really creating that amazing intersection of both better payments performance and higher trust experiences for the user.

Chris Uriarte: You’re highlighting something kind of interesting that we’ve talked about before here, which is we’re kind of seeing this full circle occur with merchants from a checkout UI, UX perspective. And this is, in particularly what I’m speaking to, is the decision that some merchants make to utilize kind of their own native checkout UI versus maybe a more optimized UI that comes directly from their payment service provider.

I think if we rewind the clock back 20 years or so, what we saw was of course merchants kind of started with their own UI. Then various things like PCI and things like that moved them to maybe hosted checkout pages and redirects and things like that. And that just became a very clunky experience, not very aligned with their brand or things along those lines.

So a lot of merchants took that back and kind of dealt with that. And then technology evolved a little bit with hosted checkout fields and things along those lines. And now I think what we’re seeing is we’re seeing a lot more merchants, not just small merchants, who’re kind of the sweet spot of this, medium size, large, even enterprise merchants seeing the benefits that are coming from what somebody like Checkout is offering on the checkout page where you spend so much time optimizing this, you’re kind of getting the network effect, if you will, from what you’re seeing from all your different clients, et cetera.

Do you see more and more enterprise merchants that are getting interested in incorporating these types of drop in UI components that you’re providing?

Jenny Hadlow: A hundred percent and you’re hitting the nail on the head. As you mentioned, SDKs and hosted payment pages used to be an SMB concept, right, companies that didn’t have the technical ability to develop full APIs. What we’ve seen, and I think it’s really accelerated just in the past two or three years, is a shift in enterprise merchants who are way more interested in using embedded payments pages.

A small bit of code that remains super high performance and in their branding and in their flows, they’re willing to install. And they’re really interested in getting further away from all of the constraints of PCI compliance. So we’re seeing a big shift in that as well. And merchants interested in vaulting and allowing companies like Checkout.com to vault all of their tokens and card details and abstract some of the complexity of PCI, and a renewed interest in SDKs and a huge appetite for it as well.

So I think you’re spot on that the shift up market is very real and we’re seeing it every day in our merchants.

Chris Uriarte: So you talk about network tokens and we’re consistently talking about network tokenization here. Famously, as we’ve mentioned many times in this podcast, one of our most listened to podcasts is an episode called We Can’t Stop Talking About Tokenization. And that’s become sort of an internal joke here at Glenbrook because the topic does come up again and again.

I think one of the perceptions that many merchants have that we speak to is that every merchant is using network tokens, every merchant has this big sophisticated network tokenization program. And in reality, when we speak to merchants about that, even though network tokens are becoming more and more mature, there’s still a lot of room to grow here.

There’s still lots of merchants that are not using network tokenization, but we consistently hear from Visa, Mastercard, the stories about performance enhancements that are obviously provided by network tokens. Obviously the inherent lifecycle management that network tokens bring to merchants, et cetera.

What are you seeing from a trend perspective when it comes to network tokens and how important is it for provider like Checkout to provide a sort of a robust ecosystem that supports them?

Jenny Hadlow: I’m a true believer in tokenization, so let’s start there. And tokens could be network tokens, they could be merchant tokens. When we start to talk about AI, tokenization is going to be critical to how that entire ecosystem works. I work very closely with Visa and Mastercard in my role on how we look at the rollout of new scheme products globally.

And you’re absolutely right to say that tokenization has been very different by geography and largely that comes down to issuers, right? And so are issuers ready for tokenization? I think we’re going to get to a point very quickly here where it becomes the global standard of tokenization. It’s one of those security layers, as I mentioned, that I think is critical to protecting both merchants and consumers from increasingly advanced fraudsters, but also allows for so many of the things that we are going to look at, like agentic commerce.

And so I think tokenization is something that if you’re a merchant and you’re not currently using or considering, you should have that conversation with the PSPs that you work with, with the scheme. You can come talk to us about it. We love tokens. We have some great blog content about it. But I do think it’s going to become the global standard and very quickly, and I think agentic commerce is, if it doesn’t happen before, will be the tipping point to make it standard.

Chris Uriarte: Well, you talked about plumbing before. I love to use that term myself as well, and I think we’re probably moving to a point where tokenization really falls under that plumbing umbrella, right? It’s part of sort of the foundational technology that is going to be required to make a payment. And I think, you highlight agentic for example, but we also have some more straightforward initiatives and mandates, I think, that are coming, like the Visa, Mastercard 2030 mandates to do away with manual entry of card numbers globally.

So when you think about that, okay, the very common question we often get is, whoa, what’s going to happen? What does that user experience look like in the future? And what that really translates to is probably more use of digital wallets, things to Click to Pay, et cetera. And tokenization is a core foundational underlying technology that fuels all of those.

So I would agree with you. I think we are moving to a point where tokenization is really going to be a standard in the future. I think it’s just a question as to how long that’s going to take. Are we going to get full across the board 100% issuer support, performance that’s necessary from all the issuers, et cetera. So it’ll be interesting to see.

So let’s move on a little bit more, focus a little bit more on the study that you guys were doing the research. And in the research you talked about this phenomenon of trust spreading through networks. And I think this is particularly insightful because you use the term network here fairly broadly and you highlight how important networks are to our digital lifestyle today.

So we’re not just talking about things like traditional social networks. But we’ve also got things like ratings, review sites and other services that rely heavily on user generated content. Or maybe you’ve got content that has been highly manipulated or prioritized by algorithms or filters. And of course now we’re getting into this new world of artificial intelligence and AI and agentic commerce.

But, it seems to me that there’s been a lot of challenges in these areas, and consumers tend to be, I would say, kind of naturally skeptical about any advice they receive from a lot of these services. There’s some of them that are much more trustworthy than others, for sure. But now as we move into the world of AI and agentic, perhaps the skepticism is bubbling up again.

How does consumer interaction with these services influence the digital economy and are customers really gaining more trust in these systems, or has all this innovation really led to some erosion in that trust that we have to regain that trust again? Where do we sort of stand today? What’s your thoughts on that?

Rory O’Neill: Look, Chris, I think you’re right. We’re sort of almost like a tipping point of an evolution this, of how the third party trust system is built up. And I think it’s one of the most fascinating parts of human nature in the last 20 years of the internet as to how we are more willing to trust people we have never met and what they think of a hotel than people we actually know that are directly in our family that have stayed at the same hotel. There’s a definite power of that peer network review, right, in terms of scale.

So look, it is a complex network now, right? Like yes, there’s various review systems, there’s various parties that do that. There’s various rating systems. There are of course now algorithms that serve stuff for us first, and then there’s our peer communities that we trust. And every single one of those is in this sort of intertwined network of trust that consumers see that yield. Staggering with position of today, which is 75% will say that they’ll heavily rely on reviews whether they trust a brand from the start or whether they’ll trust a product.

And we see that in behaviors of many merchants, right? Like in the same breath, 63% will rely on recommendations from people they know, which is 10% lower. And then you’ve got things now where you’ve got 50% of people will say if they see somebody appearing in their feed with content that they either relate to or they find authentic, then that’s where they say, well, trust will be built.

So it’s quite a complex world now and a complex matrix and I think the thing that’s going to compound now and we’ve all seen it, whilst AI can help us, it’ll help brands generate a bucket load of content. It also puts a lot of noise into the system. And we’ve all seen it. We can all tell on various networks, and there are various things that we’re looking at on the internet and on our phones that there is a bucket load of AI generated content.

Chris Uriarte: Well, AI is everywhere. Right? We used to have to go out and sort of ask for it, right? We used to have to use tools, et cetera. It seems like it’s being now embedded into really our everyday experience, including things like browsing as well, right?

Jenny Hadlow: When we think about what the AI discovery process is, and just building on what Rory was saying, today, your AI discovery process is largely a two screen, right? So you’re in an AI tool like Chat GPT or Gemini and you’re prompting. But Chris, to your point with AI browsers, Comet is an amazing product from Perplexity, Chrome is piloting a Gemini browser, but only here in the US to start.

We’re going to now bring one screen to that checkout experience, right? So you’re going to have your checkout page and you’re going to have all the AI content and reviews, as Rory’s talked about, and pulling in coupon codes and all of that happening in a single unified browser experience.

But that’s still only the discovery phase. If you go one step further and say, okay, when we get into agentic commerce, and I can tell you every time I prompt looking for products, one of the two things I prompt most heavily for are with good reviews or of similar brands, right? So if there’s a brand I like, but I’m looking for something new, I say, Hey, I want, I like this brand, I want similar brands.

And we have to start thinking about how these AI tools are going to draw on everything that Rory just described in the network effect to actually make decisions about what they give you back based on the entire digital footprint of that brand across the internet and how they understand how it’s been represented.

Chris Uriarte: One of the things that we’re talking about here, we’ve been scratching our heads a little bit over the course of the last year with agentic here at Glenbrook, is the concept of kind of the autonomous AI purchase experience versus the in session experience. And right here we’re heavily focused on our discussion right now, the in-browser, in-app experience, that sort of situation.

I agree with you. I use these tools in much a similar way, as you’ve just described, and it just seems to make sense, right, to say, go find me this, or what are my options for this. Do you think that this is going to become sort of the prevailing model? I mean, initially when we started talking about agentic commerce, we talked about this concept where we would all be sleeping and the robots would be out there buying us sneakers and groceries or whatever the case was.

But is that actually a use case that consumers want? In my head, I feel like the industry has really been leading this narrative and maybe the consumers haven’t necessarily been asking for this.

But it does seem to me that the in session type agentic use cases where you query an LLM that says, find me this, give me some options, and, ultimately, I would love to get to the point where you could just reliably say, now go buy that for me. To me, that seems to be the use case that makes most sense. What’s your thoughts on this?

Rory O’Neill: I think so. I think that we actually, we double clicked on this, Chris, because we kind of had a very similar point of view. We did a very specific piece of research around Black Friday, Cyber Monday last year. We wanted to, we were testing, the hypothesis is like, are consumers ready for the debut of agentic commerce, basically?

Or to your point, is this something that the industry is desperate to talk about and consumers couldn’t really care less about. And actually there’s two ways of interpreting the answers. But what’s interesting is like 57% of consumers we asked in the US are totally comfortable, right, already today in letting an AI agent make their purchase, right? Totally comfortable.

And that drops to about 40% in the UK. Now, if we double click a little bit on why the US and UK have different familiarity levels, maybe it is something to do with the levels that the industry noise in the US versus the UK, which kind of proves your point a little bit.

But, what I would take from that is like, we have to be super careful about saying where, how far this technology will go. Because, as much has been said, the LLM tools that we’re using today are the worst LLM tools that the humanity will ever use, right? They’re only going better second of every day.

Chris Uriarte: That’s a great way to put it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Rory O’Neill: So they’re going to get better. So it’s very careful to say what we won’t do with this technology is super hard, I think in that sort of sense. But also when you take a generational view as well, if I remember the data, like we checked with the sort of millennial generation versus even Gen Z.

It’s the millennial generation that are really, really into this technology. And again, their perception of AI agents is it’s basically to conduct the purchases that they want to make on the internet that actually they find boring or they don’t want to make, right? Which is very millennial, actually, actually, from that perspective.

So look, I think there’s a couple of things in this. I think that, I think you’re right. I think there is a stepping point where you get this in-session piece, but I think there is a demand for people to fully automate some of this stuff. I think that’s definitely there. And the driver isn’t price necessarily. The driver is convenience, and those kind of pieces.

And then on the merchant side of things, if this sounds scary, I think it probably throws out what’s always been true about great retail, which is if you make your retail experience or ceremony fun, interesting, and entertaining, consumers will want to do it. If you make it dull and not that interesting, then guess what? I think the agents take that basically. But yeah, that’s kind of what we saw in the research, Chris.

Chris Uriarte: Hmm. Very interesting. Has any of this spilled into shopping experiences this year? I know it’s still quite early in this journey. Have we seen any trends in the holiday shopping period? Anything with Black Friday in particular this year, or Cyber Monday, et cetera?

Rory O’Neill: We saw a lot of discovery, like for sure, discovery, and we were proposing that it was the first, it wasn’t quite the first AI agentic or Agent Santa Claus this time around for Christmas shopping, Chris, I think it was there in a little, but the consumer demand was there. The consumers we asked, so it was nearly 50% said they would use an AI agent for Christmas shopping.

And a third or so would say they’d use it for Black Friday sales. But it’s an intent rather than an action right now.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah. And it’s so difficult these days to really understand how the economy is doing. There’s so many different factors and we’re not going to get into geopolitics and economics here. But at the end of the day, what did you guys see at the end of 2025? How did it pan out for your merchants?

Jenny Hadlow: Yeah, so I think what we saw across the peak season, as we call it, so Black Friday through Cyber Monday. And given that we focus on digital payments, I think was really interesting because we saw a huge peak season. So in 2025, across those days, we processed 5.2 billion in e-commerce volume, and that was up 62% year over year.

Quick shout to our engineers, amazing uptime, over five nines, which I have to always give respect to the engineers building these products here at Checkout.com and everywhere else.

And what it tells me to your point is there has been a lot in geopolitics. We won’t get into it today, but we didn’t see it reflected in our merchants. We saw really strong holiday sale periods, and that is across a lot of different geographies, including the US but Europe and APAC and other markets. And that goes across a lot of different verticals that we work with. So yes, traditional retail, but we’re also supporting travel merchants, and so many other different industries. And we saw outstanding performance.

Chris Uriarte: So I think that’s really interesting what you said about the uptime because I’m a former CIO / CTO in this industry and many, many late nights spent during the holiday periods.

I feel like we didn’t hear about a lot of the meltdowns that we typically hear about every Christmas season, either from e-commerce sites or payment service providers, so that’s probably a good thing. It’s good to hear, and it’s great to hear that you guys had some great performance as well.

We talked about a lot of different themes here today in regard to payments optimization, optimization of the payments experience, optimization at checkout. I did a whole episode earlier this year on optimizing the payments experience. And one of the things though in your research is you found specifically that payments performance is equally important to consumers.

So can we talk a little bit about those trust signals that are most important to consumers and what merchants need to do to ensure that they’re really optimized in those areas? We started to talk about it a little bit. We hinted at how it is important to consumers, but now let’s translate that a little bit to really talk about what did you hear from the consumer and how does that translate into what merchants need to pay attention to?

Rory O’Neill: The headline is that I think the payment performance is outranking the delivery speed of goods or return policies, and it’s the number one factor that consumers are citing at checkout that generates trust. So that’s about speed, seamlessness, it’s like visible security cues. All those kind of pieces that are inserted into the journey flows are really, really important.

So how do we know that? Well, as I said, like 73% of consumers are saying smooth, fast, reliable payment experience is a clear sign that a brand can be trusted. The better your payment experience or the more invisible your payment experience, is directly correlated to the trust that someone has in your brand.

And we’ve covered the cart abandonment ratios, the failed payment ratios, and you put all those together, it’s payment performance now that is outranking price, delivery, speed, return policies as the number one factor, right? Those are all almost hygiene. It’s payment performance that really matters.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah, right, because if you’ve got high card abandonment because of poor performance or poor user experience, an uptick in 50 basis points of abandonment or something like that easily wipes out perhaps any cost savings that you might have had in going with a, I don’t know, a cheaper payment solution or something along those lines, right.

So performance is absolutely critical. But the big question of course, back to sort of our underlying theme today, aside from trust, is how does this change when we start thinking about agentic commerce?

Rory O’Neill: As you said, agents buying on behalf is a huge, like it’s another channel to reach a consumer. And right now, it may change in the future, but it’s the consumer that it’s still programming the agent. It’s the consumer that is setting the prompt up and setting the parameters of how the agent will behave.

So I think that the fundamentals of trust don’t change, I think that how trust is built changes. And I think that you’ve seen a lot of innovation in the industry from the schemes, from the LLM players, from software providers, from the likes of Google, Microsoft, where we’re trying to get to common protocols that allow everybody to adopt these kind of like various parts of the transactions.

And I think that that’s the right place because we’ve seen in our research that consumers worry about losing control with the agentic commerce, right? If they worry about it, it will stop them using, it’ll be barrier to entry. And I think that people worry about the transparency of bringing an agent to shop on their behalf, right? Like consumers are worried about this.

So as this technology will evolve, the industry is doing what it needs to do, which is to form broad partnerships across many, many, many players in the industry to fundamentally create trust that consumers can believe in. And that’s kind of where we are now, Chris.

Chris Uriarte: I sort of feel like there’s this arms race when it comes to these frameworks and protocols. Every day I wake up, there’s a new one that’s been announced. And not by small players, of course, we’re talking about major, major players here, and I think it’s a little difficult to make heads or tails of what’s what right now.

But I think that’s just, of course, a factor of where we are in the maturity of this. And this will probably normalize and standardize a little bit. Have you guys looked into these frameworks? Are you working with any key players on this as you think about your specific strategy for agentic?

Jenny Hadlow: Yeah, absolutely. We’re taking the approach that we need to be working with all the major players across here, and we’ve done so already, on Visa’s protocol, Open AI’s protocol. We’re planning to work with Mastercard on their new protocol, the same with Google. So it is really important that we be ready for our merchants, because the reality here is that payment service providers are going to abstract the complexity of these protocols for our merchants.

We’re not going to expect merchants and their engineers to be the one that decide which protocol do I choose to integrate with. They’re going to rely on their PSPs to do that, and so we need to stay ahead of the curve. We do, this is a little bit of forecasting, so take it with a grain of salt.

Chris Uriarte: Get out the crystal ball a little bit. Let’s talk about it.

Jenny Hadlow: But I do think you’re going to see consolidation. So there are a lot of protocols being generated right now. To be fair, they’re very few, if any, true live use cases of what we’re talking about here, and it’s an arms race to see how quickly the combination of schemes, PSPs, technology companies, and merchants can get to what we’re actually talking about. But we do think a few players will surface as a part of that arms race as the strongest, and we’ll see a consolidation on the back of that.

And in the meantime, the role that we have to play is making sure that we’re ready with all of the tech companies and schemes and what they’re putting out and we’re educating our merchants and partnering with them on helping them understand and owning that level of technical complexity inside Checkout.com.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah. Interesting. I think I agree with you for the most part there. I think we are going to see some consolidation. I think it’s going to be a long time before we see any true, true standards in this space. Although we do know that some of the standard bodies like W3C are getting involved at least looking at this. But we all know it takes a long, long time for those standards to develop. So it’ll be interesting to see where that goes.

So we’ve talked about a lot of different things today and let’s say that I’m a merchant or traditional online retailer, maybe I’m a marketplace, a small business. How do I digest all this that we’ve been talking about? How do I respond to the findings that you guys have seen in this research and what can I do to ensure that I’m meeting or exceeding consumer expectations when it comes to trust?

Rory O’Neill: So the first thing, I think, is like prioritizing the importance of that payment performance, right? I know everyone has kind of optimized payment performance to really solve that payment value equation, right? What acceptance rate can I hit for the cost that I have to pay in the markets that I’m actually operating in.

I think that actually builds consumer trust. It’s a trust signal in itself. Maybe a simple example, I mean, I think most people in the world remember when they took their first Uber. And, Checkout now is obviously very, very pleased and proud to process for the team at Uber, they’re a terrific team, in the payments team.

And we all remember that it was almost like magic, right? It just worked. We stepped out of the cab and we realized that we then paid for it, right? It was that invisible. And I think that it’s amazing when you think back now that that magical payment experience actually generated a lot of trust we had in Uber as a brand.

That’s the major message I think for the merchants that are listening to this call. I think that we’ve all optimized the payment industry for a long time. We’re throwing AI at everything. Checkout has millions of lines of code to optimize payment performance everywhere around the world. I think that it’s great that it’s driving revenue, but it’s also driving consumer trust in your brand. And that’s, I think, very material.

Chris Uriarte: I think I’ll feel that same wow when I could go into a Chat GPT session, I could curate a whole list of different items, maybe from different retailers and then just kind of hit that buy button and it just happens, right? We’re just not quite there yet. Maybe a little bit on some of these individual integrations they have, we’re kind of approaching it, but we’re still kind of a long ways away from being able to do that at scale.

I want to wrap up by hitting on one big, really important topic, right? We’re, of course, have talked a lot about the innovation that’s happening here, these new services, everything that’s been changing in the agentic world.

But of course, it’s very difficult to talk about this stuff without talking about risk. Without talking about all the challenges that we have in the industry with scams, with fraud, with things along those lines. So I want to get your perspective as to what some of the emerging threats to trust are as we continue to evolve in this changing world that is very, very AI driven.

So what are some of the things that are keeping you guys up at night? What are some of the things that merchants should be concerned about and what are some of the things that we should be thinking about to help mitigate some of these risks?

Rory O’Neill: Maybe we do this in two parts, Jenny. How about we do what we always do. So I give you a problem and then you solve it, way to think about it.

Chris Uriarte: The true marketing guy versus the operational leader.

Jenny Hadlow: Our favorite way to ham and egg it.

Rory O’Neill: There’s no doubt that everybody needs a Jenny Hadlow in their life, Chris, I can tell you that many times over. Obviously there’s a lot of use of AI and great technology in the fraud world, right? It always, those worlds are going to be acutely deploying that technology. Fraudsters will use exactly the same technology we’ve been talking about in the positive sense to help them be more successful in what they’re trying to do.

Identity is a concern. Identity risk is rising, right? I think that we’ve had some fun on our teams of I asked my team to kind of see how many identities they could create with me on the internet using various tools. They had hundreds in seconds. And if it’s that easy to fake identity, then that clearly that has a role or a challenge in digital payments.

So, there’s AI in fraud, there’s identity risk. There’s a lot of data in our system. and I think that poor handling of consumer data, consumer data getting out into places where it shouldn’t be or being handled badly, I think that can erode trust. If we’re marketed to by brands we didn’t give our data to, it doesn’t make us feel good about that kind of stuff. So that I think definitely is another sort of potential problem we’ve got to look at.

And then I think there’s just that wonderful balance in payments, right? We’ve talked a lot about speed and maybe I’ll say it this way, but a great payments experience isn’t necessarily all about speed. There is a tension naturally in that system where like, let’s not over optimize for conversion speed. So it’s not conversion at all costs, maybe, is what I would think about.

So I feel like those are some of the things, Chris. AI and fraud, identity risk, data misuse, and then the propensity for people to prioritize or optimize for speed versus the right sort of verification perhaps is the right way.

Chris Uriarte: So Jenny, how do we make it work?

Jenny Hadlow: I think it’s building on the data piece here, right? I think that one of the coolest things about payments is what I started the call with. It’s incredibly technical. It’s also incredibly data rich, and we have this really big opportunity amongst the parties, three or four parties in the system to share proprietary data and therefore to fight fraud.

And I do think that a lot of what we get down to is going to be about how do merchants share data with us? There’s so much technology behind here that they can put in their payload, whether it’s data they collected as a part of the payments form or data from the device ID or biometric data that they’re collecting as part of the payments experience and then passing that to us.

And as Rory mentioned, sometimes we see merchants shy away from big payloads because they’re trying to optimize for speed and performance, but it’s going to be that fine balance. And we spend a lot of time with our merchants on this about how do we collect enough data as a part of the transaction experience. And then for us as a PSP, it’s also doing some proprietary data sharing amongst that network.

And so we’ve made a big effort in ’25, and it continues in ’26 on data sharing with issuers. And that’s going to continue with schemes where if we put enough of that data that only the right people would have, only the consumer, only the merchant, only the PSP in, we should be able to both optimize for payments, because a lot of it can go into optimizing for the right routing of payments and payment performance, but it also plays a huge role in helping to fight fraud at every layer here and I think will prepare us and all of the merchants for the right level of security when we get to agentic as well. It’s going to rely on a lot of those data points that I just mentioned.

Chris Uriarte: Yeah, the evolution in merchant, PSP, card network, issuer data sharing is a whole episode in and of itself that we probably need to take up this year, because, as you guys know, there’s a lot of things happening in this space, so we’ll keep an eye on that.

But I guess I’ll just close out by asking us a general question of like, where does this leave us, right? Are we moving in a positive direction? And the only reason that I ask that is because some of the things that you’re talking about, Rory, like when we’re talking about, these are themes that we have tackled over the last 20 years, and I feel like we’re taking a step back and we have to reassess them again because this is such a big paradigm shift right, in regards to identity, in regards to verification and validation.

We’re moving away from know your customer into know your agent sort of scenario, who can you trust? Are we taking steps backwards? What do you think? How do the participants in your study feel about the current state of play and what is some of the things that we need to think about moving forward?

Rory O’Neill: What we’ve seen in the survey is it is clearly, it’s much more important actually than we thought when we first started to conduct the research. And we have a saying at Checkout, we use a lot around, there’s no finish line for a lot of the work that we have. The company has been built on people who put energy and innovation into chasing every basis point to make sure payment acceptance rates are as high as possible, and there’s never any finish line to that work.

And we’ve added an extension, Chris, which is basically trust has no finish line. You can never do enough to actually establish trust. And as the paradigm shifts into agentic, then that’s where it’s going to become critical again. And we’re seeing, I think we’re right at the beginning points of the industry reacting with, as Jenny was talking about, with the partnerships that are being created. That’s all being done to generate and syndicate the same level of trust we have in online traditional online commerce and the agentic commerce.

And I’d argue that we haven’t quite gotten over that trust hump yet, or that trust barrier. We’re still working through it, right. And I think that it will never be done. But I know Jenny’s a positive on the fact that we are moving forward. Jenny?

Jenny Hadlow: I do think we are, and I go back to what I found most interesting about the survey we did was it was so global and some of the trends you see in other countries around the world are admittedly ahead of us. And I’m American. I live in the US and I can admit that the US is just behind on some of the payments technology.

We’re ahead on AI trust than in the UK but I do see where payments and where some of these trends are going around the world. And I do believe that we’re all headed in the right direction. And I think that there’s a lot of progress we will make very quickly in terms of how payments are made, how we build the trust with consumers.

And in the report you get a real global landscape for that to see how countries land. And I have real belief that we’re headed in the right direction, not just for merchants, but most importantly for the end consumers.

Chris Uriarte: All right. Well, that’s a good way to end it. And I love the term trust has no finish line. I think that’s a great way to end it for this theme. This has been a great discussion. I really appreciate your time. Jenny, Rory, thank you so much. The team from Checkout.com here with us today on Payments on Fire.

To all our loyal listeners. We will catch you next time on Payments on Fire. Until then, do good work and have a great day.