RAJEEV YERUKALAPUDI: I was just thinking my session was sandwiched right in between the lunch and cocktails on a beautiful day in San Francisco when everyone wants to be out. Can't tell if it's a good thing because most likely no one will listen to what I'm about to say or a bad thing because no one will listen to what I'm about to say. But jokes aside, I'm Rajeev. I have the privilege of leading the Strategy and Partnerships function at Verifone. And this is my third Sessions with the Stripe team. As most of you can tell, it continues to get bigger and better, solving bigger and bolder challenges—be it agentic AI, be it stablecoins, we've heard all about them. But one such very bold challenge that we're embarking on solving jointly, along with Stripe and everyone else in the room here, is this idea of identity in physical commerce, which I think still has a lot of friction in the consumer experience.

So for, call it almost five decades, like in payments, the identity was either the piece of plastic a consumer carried or a device that you have on you or even worse, the digits that you can recollect on top of your head, be it be the 16 digits or the CVVs or what have you. But I think in 2026, we're at a different point in time where the identity can be you yourself. It doesn't have to be anything else. And as we look at our everyday walk of life, what I'm about to say doesn't sound as theoretical. We see this application in quite a few walks of life already. How many of you actually had to get on a plane to get to San Francisco this week? And how many of you went through some sort of TSA where your face was your identity to get through security?

So be it be airports or transit or even use cases around how you authenticate into your device and even conduct high, sort of, critical banking transactions such as transfers and things like that. So biometrics has been entrenched in almost all walks of everyone's life. And even if you look at the macro data around the comfort levels of various, sort of, populations around biometrics, the stats kind of reveal the same. Be it Gen Zs—and I'm not going to read the stats for you guys, you can see it—or even the millennials or the Gen X, the stats kind of tell the same story on the comfort levels around biometrics is already there and continues to grow. One other macro stat we keep a close track of here at Verifone is the idea of how many consumers, not just in North America, but for that matter all around the world, think biometrics is an even more safer way of authenticating.

The numbers are quite staggering, right? So north of 80% of the people see biometrics as a more safer way of identifying themselves even in the physical environment. So there's enough macro data points that tell us the time is right, and it takes someone like us and partners like all you guys in this ecosystem to partner up and really tackle this bold challenge. And that's what we're about to do. Now let's just frame the same thing from maybe a merchant standpoint for a moment. So again, pretty self-explanatory. Most merchants operate in a very complex environment, right? So they interact with their consumers through a myriad of channels. Could be drive-throughs, could be self-service, checkouts, in stores, online, mobile apps, all the stuff that I'm sure most of you in the room have interacted with at least once. Maybe just take one example, the first bubble called “drive-thru”. If any one of you operate a QSR here or pay attention to QSR as an industry vertical, most people would tell you drive-through is one of the fastest growing channels for a QSR vertical.

It's very, very important. But if you imagine the drive-through experience, even in 2026, just imagine the friction in that experience. Somebody rolls into the drive-through entrance, somebody else orders, there's another person on the other side taking the orders and converting that into something that a system can read. Then you flip to the other side—and I've recently had an experience in one of the drive-throughs, won't name them on this stage—where somebody tied a card-present terminal to a stick and extended it into the car for me to make a payment. By the way, it's not uncommon. This is how this industry operates even in 2026. All of it goes to the root of the problem, which is when somebody enters the drive-through, the QSR, despite that this person may have shown up there 15 times the prior week, most likely has no idea who that person is, hence the friction.

Now, if you think about the same problem in the digital realm, which has existed for over a decade now, be it web or mobile, it's not as hard. There's a lot of metadata that most merchants and platforms use—could be device fingerprints, IP addresses, guest logins—all sorts of things where they may not exactly know who the consumer is, but most merchants get darn good at predicting at least the basic demographic data of who's interacting with a merchant at any point in time, even if you're in an incognito browser. But when you take the same experience and transcend it into the physical world, this is where things start breaking because the notion for the merchant to know who is the person on the other side interacting with them—could be for payments, could be for any part of the commerce journey, discovery, loyalty, making a decision on what to buy—knowing who the person that you're interacting with as a merchant truly matters.

And it is incredibly hard to do in the physical world even today. And we believe the linchpin here is biometrics. This kind of eliminates the gap between the physical and the digital world divide and truly drives the experience towards what we believe is omnichannel. And the word, and I just thought it's worth spending maybe 30 seconds on the word omnichannel because it's existed for over a decade. But most omnichannel use cases have always revolved around, really, payments. Can you make a payment using your preferred payment method in any of the channels that you interact with the merchant? Could you do things like buy online or return in store and so on and so forth? But while payments are extremely important, as most of us would know, that is the absolute last step in the commerce journey. But what starts much ahead of the game is how you actually discover, how you interact, how you make a decision, how you even go through the whole purchase emotion on what to buy before you get to payments.

And that's where I don't think the omnichannel truly transcends. As an example, and I've had this happen to me recently, one of the large clothing retailers—again, won't name them—I added a bunch of jeans into my shopping cart. You could clearly tell that I had a very strong signal that I wanted to buy a pair of blue jeans. That's why I had a bunch of them in the shopping cart, but I wanted to go to the store and try them before I buy one of them. I walk into the store, and this is a brand I've interacted with at least—call it 10 times in the last 12 months, it's not like I'm a foreigner to them—but I walk into the store and I just get treated like just everybody else. There is just no ounce of personalization in this experience. All stems from the idea that despite that they have seen me at least a dozen times in the last 12 months and there is a very strong buying intent—I was on their website five times, there's a bunch of goods sitting in that shopping cart, not checked out yet—but still, none of it mattered when I walked into the store. 

And that's really the gap that we think we can solve through biometrics. Now, let's just maybe spend a minute on a typical commerce journey. Now, this largely transits to every merchant, every vertical, SMB, enterprise, retail, hospitality, whatever. But if you kind of take a broad brush and paint the journey that a consumer goes through in the commerce space: you start with discovery, go through some amount of engagement where you're engaging with the brand, you're deciding what to do, you're comparing, you're looking at the prices at various places, then you eventually get to a decision point, which is you're going to buy if yes, how much and where and how and so on and so forth, followed by—decision always follows a payment because that's how you get the goods delivered to you.

And in some cases, there's always some kind of recognition and rewards and so on and so forth. And last but not the least, there's some sort of fulfillment step. It could be you buying a coffee in a coffee shop or me buying a pair of jeans in a retail store. But typically you could argue this largely follows the footprint of what a consumer goes through in a commerce journey.

Now let's take this and maybe apply it to some of, let's call it everyday use cases. And this is something I personally went through this morning. I live in New York. I'm visiting San Francisco, beautiful city. Love it. Perfect time of the year. I was up, as you might expect at six in the morning because it was already nine my body time and I had to go find myself a coffee. And I had an option to either go to a Starbucks, which I can find everywhere in the world, or there's some local coffee shop that I could have gone and tried. And I chose to do the latter. So I went to a local coffee shop.

This is how my experience kind of went, right? I walked into the store, I placed my order on what I wanted. I had to pick up my phone, unlock the phone. By the way, I'm [explaining] things that you all hopefully know very well, right? Very obvious. I found the Apple Pay app. And by the way, this merchant also happened to be using a specific payments provider who is really, really big in the Apple vast space. So I actually had Apple Pass provision in my wallet. So there was another incremental step of me finding my loyalty pass in my Apple Passes and go scan the QR code, then select the payment method and ultimately go tap my phone. So you can kind of imagine what was really me just buying my morning coffee, at least included somewhere between three-to-five different steps between I got to the end of the job, if you thought the first step of that commerce journey was how I actually found that merchant and how I discovered their menu or how to even make an order.

Now, if you just take the same example and almost apply to maybe a different vertical. Like most of you, I would probably buy groceries at least once a week or in some cases even more often. This is how that experience typically goes: People go, walk the aisles, especially if you go with someone like my wife—she loves spending like 45 minutes aimlessly walking around. I still couldn't figure out why. And I straight go to what I like, which is the wine counter, go pick up my favorite wines while she does her job. Most cases, most grocery stores have some sort of loyalty card. I'm sure most of you have key chains with hanging barcodes and things of that nature attached to the key chains. That's how, whether you go to—let's not take names—but any store, that's how the store identifies who the consumer is, and then go—and particularly because when there are people like me included where I end up buying some sort of age-restricted product, my favorite wine—this is if you talk to any large grocer, the first thing you'll understand from them is they all love self-service checkouts, but they hate it when it breaks. And it breaks when there are things in the shopping cart where somebody has to come physically assist you. It could be an age-restricted product or in some cases could be a high value product such as whatever, like a high expensive TV and things of that nature. But point being, there are times when the self-service flow even breaks, and it gets stepped up because you have to verify your ID and things of that nature, and it doesn't stop there.

So now ultimately you got to make a payment and you got to collect your receipt. Now, it's hard to debate every single experience goes exactly in the same linear path, but you get the broad idea that, for you to sort of do what you would do sometimes tens of times in a month, you go through at least like five-to-six steps before you get to the end of the job, which is you actually bought the product that you wanted to do. Now, this is where we fundamentally believe, and this isn't something just we by ourselves could do, but the reason why we chose this topic at this particular stage and platform is because we're surrounded by all the right players in the ecosystem. But if all of us work together, this is a problem that I think we can truly solve. So there are ways, and we fundamentally believe in this, where identifying a person as he or she walks into the store and really wrapping around the whole commerce experience around what the merchant knows about them or what the shopping signal tells the merchant that they're in the store for, I think will be incredibly valuable and very, very differentiated.

And this 10 years ago was probably hard to argue that's the right time to do, but now we believe it's the right time to do. Not so much because the tech has evolved and it's there, but more importantly because the consumer adoption and people's familiarity with using biometrics as a way to identify them as we've already talked about is there. And that's the reason why we've been investing significantly in this space. Now, if you think about the ecosystem play for a second, this is kind of our view of the value of biometrics transcends way beyond just payments. But even if you just start on the payments, there's so many use cases that we can talk about. We won't have time to get through all of it, but I'll just maybe call out one or two simple examples. 

Most of you have interacted with some kind of buy now pay layer providers. Most of you have interacted with some kind of alternate payment methods. Now doing all of them in the context of a digital world, whether it's online or mobile, in the grand scheme of things is good. It works. I personally use one of the BNPL providers that all of you I'm sure will know, but just imagine using one of them in the store. Even in 2026, it is a ton of friction, right? And we say this because we actually see macro data across not just North America, but all around the world, by being—roughly about a third of card present states in the world, we get to see a lot of usage patterns. And our data tells us the same thing: while there is very explicit interest, but the friction to use one of these alternate payment methods in the in-store environment is incredibly hard.

Now, imagine how frictionless it could be when you don't have to pull out your phones or scan QR codes or go to the right apps and authenticate the transactions and so on and so forth. So our thought: biometrics definitely adds a lot of value in the payments-related use cases, but I think it's even more interesting in the overarching commerce ecosystem that sort of precedes a payment and succeeds a payment, things that happen after the payment has been made, such as receipts and things of that nature. Again, intention is not to go through every one of them, but you can kind of see them on the screen. There's a few that we've been kicking around with and there's a few that we've been piloting with some large merchants around. And actually I'm in a job that needs me to travel quite a bit and I do travel at least four to five times a month and I do most often stay with the same chain of hotels that I stay with.

And I go through the exact same thing no matter where I go. Who are you? Can we see your license? Where is your credit card? Despite I've already given them my credit card once when I made the reservation. Just think through the experience that most of you go through. So our simple thought, tying all of this, not just the payment into a consumer identity, I think significantly simplifies this and adds a lot of differentiation to the merchant. And we have been in conversations with a lot of them and we're in some pilots with most. Now, this is kind of how we see the ecosystem evolving. So we look at ourselves as there is some level of, like an orchestration that happens in the biometric space. But like I said, at the forefront of this, this is not something that we ourselves are set out to solve all by ourselves.

We believe what we're creating is the infrastructure for all the partners. You could be a loyalty platform or you could be an app that's used by tens of millions of consumers. We call them as consumer platforms, or you could be a payments platform, or you could be offers, or you could be a KYC, or you could be an age verification tool, or you could be someone like Experian that has credit data on a person. The list is endless, but our view of the world is we're in the process of creating a centralized orchestration engine that plugs into a myriad of this that hopefully solves single identity and sets standards for how this works in the physical world. Now, maybe just to sort of progress the conversation forward, there is a view around—if you just think about this picture for a second and think of this as the overarching ecosystem where consumers interact with, there is a world where people go through enrollment into a lot of these several times, right?

So people enroll in their loyalty. It doesn't have to be through biometrics, maybe it's through your email or your phone number or what have you, but it's not uncommon for a person to manage and maintain their identity across a slew of platforms today. This happens today, by the way, right? Most of you, I assume, have some sort of sign-up done in so many different platforms for different reasons. Our view of the world, there is a way to think about a centralized energy where consumers go to one place and one place only to manage their identity and that gets federated across all of them, which is really the world we're aspiring for. And that is the reason why a standards-driven biometrics platform, which hopefully is interoperable across an ecosystem of partners and players, is the world that we believe in. And we've been kind of working towards that one step at a time.

Now, if you just take everything we went through in the past, call it 15—20 minutes now, and apply to maybe three-to-four major industry verticals and just start thinking through what are some of the use cases, just starting with retail, think about how interesting the checkout experience could be. Think about how anything in the realm of cross-channel interaction—the example I was just going through earlier with you all, the fact that I was on the website of a large retailer and I had like $500 worth of jeans sitting in a shopping cart and I walk into the store and yet the store had no context of any of that. Imagine a world where if the store knew all of it, like the cross-channel interactions could be a lot more richer. Think about even mundane tasks like returns. Think about the personalized experience that a shopper can be offered when they walk into the store.

The list is endless, right? So there's so many of these that we've been kind of piloting or in some cases still in the discovery stage, but we've been working with some of the largest retailers you can think of in thinking through which of these are really differentiated and which of these are needle movers. Now, retail, while it's big, it's not the only one. So just kind of switching gears and going to a slightly different use case, think about hospitality, think about stadiums, events, concerts, theme parks, all sorts of things. Largely the same story applies. So I was recently at Knick’s game at Madison Square Garden in New York City, not roughly two days ago, and my face was my access to access the stadium, but where it stops is exactly there. Once you get into the stadium, your face is useless. You still need everything else, right?

So you need a license to buy a glass of beer, you need your phone to buy whatever you need to do, et cetera. So this is kind of what our view of the world on, I think biometrics have solved point use cases, like to access a stadium, there's biometrics. To get through an airport, there's biometrics. And this actually happened to me two days ago as well when I was coming to San Francisco. I could get through the whole TSA pre-check using my face. I had like 45 minutes to board the plane and I decided to go and grab a glass of beer at one of the bars. Nothing works, right? You still need your ID, you still need your license. If you could get through the airport without the license, I don't know why you need license to buy a beer, right? You get my point.

So there is a lot where we could enable this in... This is kind of our view as in the sense we by ourselves, we can probably solve maybe parts of this ecosystem, but for us to truly get this to ubiquity, I think us by ourselves or for that matter, any individual by themselves cannot solve it. And that's the reason why we think this is truly an ecosystem play and this is truly a standards-driven play. And it's all about interoperability across all the partners who participate in the commerce ecosystem. Now, you could kind of transcend the same into the grocery space. So we've kind of gone through it already, but think about friction around where self-service checkout breaks. Think about how anything in the subscription-based category works. Think about how offers or personalization or even things like retail media in the context of a grocery store can work when a person is standing at the checkout aisle for, call it roughly two minutes, while a transaction is being processed and the store has almost undivided attention off that person for those two-to-three minutes when your basket is getting scanned.

But just think about everything a retailer can do if only they knew who the person standing there was for the two-to-three minutes. And I would argue most large retailers are in the business of retail media. They use all the first-party data to drive ads in the stores, but they drive ads by putting them on televisions on the walls, which I would argue has maybe a third of visibility.

What is the probability of someone paying attention to what is on a TV when you're in a large retail store shopping? Maybe 20%, maybe 30%. What is the probability that somebody is going to pay attention to what is on the payment terminal for those two-to-three minutes when they're standing in front of the checkout aisle? I'd argue 90% because you're actually paying attention to what is being scanned and how much money you owe. But now just think through the art of possible on what a grocers or a retailer for that matter could do if only they knew who the person standing in front of them was. So these are all the use cases, but all of it goes back to where I kind of started this dialogue on, it's all about identity in the physical commerce, which I think has been incredibly hard to solve, but we think the time is now. And last but not the least, I won't go too deep into this, but we touched on this briefly.

So QSRs, this is by the way, a segment that we personally at Verifone love a lot because we have a lot of market share in this space. We work with the big ones, the mid-sized ones, the small ones, the North American-based ones, the international ones. We work with them all over the world, and we understand the nuances of things like order ahead or drive-throughs and how all of these channels or even self-service kiosks inside a QSR works. So our view of the world, it's not just always about the commerce, but I go to Starbucks and I order the same thing every time I go, but I have to still order the same thing every time I go. How cool will it be if I actually check into the store and it tells me, "Welcome, Rajeev, do you want a mid-size cappuccino with two extra pumps of hazelnut and extra hot?" All I have to say is yes.

In one interaction, I placed my order, I made a payment, in most cases I've owned or even redeemed some kind of loyalty all with title one single interaction. So we genuinely believe this is an ecosystem play. This is a partnerships play. We don't believe this is something that any one of us can individually solve, but collectively between the consumer platforms, the fintechs that have access to tens of millions of consumers, the loyalties, the KYCs, the financial institutions and the acquirers and many others who kind of participate in this platform, we've been working with all of them to A: build a common standard and framework for how identity can be federated across all of it, and B: how do we get all of this orchestrated across a variety of merchants, payment methods, networks, and all sorts of things. So it's not something that, as I said, we ourselves can solve, but collectively, we think we can make a very, very big impact and we genuinely believe that time is now.

With that, we started this conversation thinking about authentication in the card presence space, but hopefully you're taking away that biometrics isn't just in our wines, at least a payments feature. It's not how do we go shave another half of a second from how somebody makes a payment. I don't think that's the goal, but our real goal here is how do we reframe the entire commerce journey all the way from discovery to fulfillment and all the steps in between transcending both the physical world and the digital world. That's all I got. Thank you for listening.