Fintech Checkout.com is entering a new era after spending over a decade laser focused on enterprise customers and payment performance, a vision that saw it process over $300 billion in e-commerce volume in 2025.

The London-based payment service provider, or PSP, now handles transactions for Uber, eBay, and Spotify and has a full year of profitability under its belt, after years of growth-focused spending.

"Staying focused on the core customer and our core offering, for us, for the last few years, it's been enterprise and performance,” Chief Product Officer Meron Colbeci tells The Stack.

The Stack sat down with Colbeci in London.

"Building a core business that is sustainable and good enables you to make a number of educated bets," the CPO adds. 

Colbeci outlined three areas the PSP was carefully moving into: agentic commerce, stablecoin settlement, and direct acquiring in the United States via a new banking charter.

"We have an internal process on how we make these bets judiciously, but also not do too many of them." Colbeci is confident Checkout.com’s reputation for being performance-obsessed will carry it through this new era, no matter where the chips fall. 

Agent, add to basket

The payments industry has spent the past year talking about "agentic commerce,” the idea that AI systems will eventually discover products, compare prices, and complete purchases on behalf of consumers. Colbeci is cautious about the hype.

"The honest answer is we don't know yet. It's very early days for agentic commerce," he says. "It's very much top of mind for a lot of retailers, for a lot of payment companies that want to be prepared for this world.”

The uncertainty hasn't stopped Checkout.com from positioning itself. The broader strategy seems to be avoiding picking winners too early: “Our approach at Checkout.com is to work with as many partners across the ecosystem.”

Colbeci says whether that’s Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, or card networks like Mastercard and Visa, the PSP would help its customers “understand the nature of this fast-moving sector, and how we facilitate payments in this new world.”

That hedge makes sense. Google launched its Agent Payments Protocol in September 2025. PayPal followed with its own agentic commerce services in October. Visa and Mastercard are running pilots, with commercial deployment expected as early as Q1 2026. The infrastructure is still fragmented and enterprises are navigating the new industry together. 

The right time for stablecoin

When Checkout.com first started offering stablecoin settlement to merchants in 2022, the regulatory environment was “pretty tricky," Colbeci says, "but that environment has changed."

The latest pitch is straightforward: traditional card network settlement runs on banking hours, meaning funds processed on Friday often don't arrive until Monday. Stablecoins settle around the clock.

"The ability to get settled 24/7 and not be dependent on banking hours, as well as the immediacy and the speed that stablecoins get settled, is attractive to some customers that are very liquidity sensitive," Colbeci said.

Two regulatory shifts have reopened the window. In Europe, the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation came into full effect in late 2024. In the U.S., the current administration has signalled a more permissive approach to digital assets.

Checkout.com recently announced its acquisition of a Lithuanian payment service that can issue euro-backed stablecoins under the MiCA regulations in January. 

U.S. horizons

Checkout.com's third priority in 2026 is regulatory rather than technological. The company has obtained a Merchant Acquirer Limited Purpose Bank (MALPB) charter from the state of Georgia, a licence that lets it connect directly to Visa and Mastercard in the US without relying on a sponsoring bank.

"The classic model for an acquirer in the U.S. is to go through a BIN sponsor," Colbeci explained. "You have to partner with a bank and the bank has oversight around your onboarding policy and could affect pricing, and you're essentially borrowing their licence."

The MALPB charter changes that. "It gives you the opportunity to do that without a BIN sponsor, which is much more akin to the European model," Colbeci says. The new license gives them much more control over the experience, payment performance, pricing and customer onboarding. 

Georgia created the MALPB charter in 2012, but it sat unused for over a decade, card networks historically refused to grant direct membership to non-banks. That changed recently. Fiserv became the first company to process transactions under a MALPB charter in April 2025. Stripe's application was approved later that year.

For Checkout.com, the licence aligns its U.S. operations with how it already operates in Europe. The practical benefits for merchants: potentially improved authorisation rates, greater pricing transparency, and the ability to onboard customers that BIN sponsors might have rejected.

"The U.S. is our fastest growing market," Colbeci said. "But it's also one where we probably have the biggest opportunity." 

The discipline behind the roadmap

Colbeci returned repeatedly to the idea that these bets extend from Checkout.com’s core business, not distract from it.

"We want to continue to grow. We want to continue to evolve," he said. "We want to focus on what we do well and how we expand there. We're not so much worried about the competition. We'll deal with that when we need to."

Whether it’s agentic commerce, stablecoins, and direct U.S. acquiring, success will depend on factors largely outside Checkout.com's control: consumer behaviour, regulatory shifts, the decisions of card networks and AI labs. What the company can control is how much it wagers.

"In 2026, we're starting to expand out while we're continuing to strengthen our offering," Colbeci says, "whilst making a few bets." A few. Not many.

Delivered in partnership with Checkout.com.

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