Who are Checkout.com's decision-makers?

Guillaume Pousaz is the sole founder and CEO. Born near Geneva, he studied at EPFL and HEC Lausanne before building payments expertise through International Payments Consultants, co-founding NetMerchant (a US-to-Europe transfer service), and building Opus Payments in Singapore before incorporating Checkout.com in the UK in 2012. He ran it profitably for seven years without investors — a profile that commands deep respect across the global payments industry. By his own account he knows every one of Checkout.com's ~1,000 enterprise merchants personally.

The CTO, Mariano Albera, brings enterprise infrastructure credibility from CTO stints at Expedia B2B, OVO Energy, Thomas Cook, and Opodo — all businesses with high transaction volume and complex global data requirements. Appointed CTO in November 2023, he leads a 600+ person engineering organisation. CFO Philip Symes joined in December 2024 as interim CFO, bringing 10 years as CFO at Visa Europe through its £13.7B acquisition by Visa Inc., followed by senior roles at Willis Towers Watson and Cambridge Education Group. CPO Meron Colbeci (Meta Novi, PayPal, SoFi) leads product, COO Jenny Hadlow (Yext NYSE IPO) runs operations, and CCO Bradley Riss (Adyen, Digital River) has led global commercial strategy since October 2018 — the longest-tenured C-suite member outside of Pousaz himself.

For strategic vendor relationships (cloud infrastructure, data and analytics, compliance, finance transformation), CFO Philip Symes and COO Jenny Hadlow are the economic buyers — Symes owns cost governance and financial controls, Hadlow owns operational tooling and scaling efficiency. For technology vendors (developer tooling, observability, security infrastructure), CTO Mariano Albera and his VP-level engineering leaders control budget. For sales and GTM tooling, CCO Bradley Riss and CRO Antoine Nougué jointly own the revenue stack.

For product partnerships (identity verification vendors, fraud tools, issuing infrastructure), CPO Meron Colbeci and the product operations team evaluate and approve. For agentic commerce and new protocol partnerships — Google UCP, Visa Intelligent Commerce, Mastercard Agent Pay — Pousaz and Colbeci drive these at the strategic level. Senior individual contributors — principal engineers, senior product managers — are typically champions who surface vendor candidates to the C-suite. Guillaume Pousaz remains directly involved in any vendor relationship that is material to merchant experience or company strategy.

Checkout.com is organized around functional C-suite verticals rather than geographic or product P&Ls, reflecting its compact but high-output 2,000-person team. Engineering is centralized under Mariano Albera's ~600-person org. Revenue is distributed under CCO Bradley Riss (global commercial strategy) and CRO Antoine Nougué (execution and relationships), with regional MDs managing enterprise account coverage in each market. Operations, merchant success, and risk operations report to COO Jenny Hadlow.

The company opened a San Francisco office in February 2025, signaling increased investment in the US market as it becomes the fastest-growing revenue region (approximately 80% growth in 2024). The January 2026 Georgia MALPB banking charter and Vilnius technology centre establishment are further signals of deliberate geographic build-out. Pousaz remains deeply involved in key merchant relationships by design — which keeps strategic decision-making centralized at the top and means mid-market vendor outreach typically requires either a warm referral or a very compelling business case to reach C-suite attention.