RAJEEV YERUKALAPUDI: Hello everyone, I’m Rajeev. I lead the Strategy and Partnerships team here for Verifone. Hopefully you all saw some of the announcements that we made in partnership with Stripe this morning. 

So I’m here to talk a little bit more about how Verifone and Stripe are partnering to break down some of the barriers in commerce, particularly in the in-store environment. So let’s dive straight in. I thought a great place to start this conversation is to maybe just take a quick second and roll back in time and just think through the evolution of value exchange. 

Our value exchange, as most of you know, started with cash and checks, evolved into physical or plastic currencies, evolved further into digital commerce through mobile apps, and I’m sure it's going to evolve even further. While this is phenomenal, what this has led to is enormous amounts of complexity with the myriad of payment methods, payment channels, payment modalities, and so on and so forth. 

However, there’s just one thing that has always reigned [as] the supremacy of consumer expectations, and that’s convenience. And we all believe convenience is the ultimate currency. Now the question is, how do we get there? At Verifone, we have deep faith and belief that there’s a bunch of trends that will shape the next generation of commerce, particularly in the in-store environment. But there are particularly three that we wanted to tease out a little bit and touch on a little. 

Let’s start. One, the connected commerce journey. What do we mean by that? First and foremost, maybe a great place to start is that physical commerce is thriving. There’s a lot of experts, particularly during COVID times, I’m sure most of you in the room would remember, who predicted ecommerce may take over the world. Physical commerce is a thing of the past. Five years or three years since COVID, that hasn’t really come true. What has come true is the inverse, right? 

So physical commerce is still a large part of the global economy, and it’s thriving, and it’s continuing to grow. To be honest, based on a Forrester survey we got access to, close to about three-quarters of global commerce still happens in stores. That’s roughly about, like, $22 trillion out of the $29 trillion global commerce market. That’s a staggering number. Not only is it big, it’s thriving, and it’s continuing to grow at a phenomenal clip. 

We believe the next-generation retail ecosystem, or the folks who will win this space, are the ones who will very naturally blend what happens in the digital world as well as physical world, almost to a point where the retailers won’t think about these as distinct channels but will think about this as one connected commerce journey—not just for the payment piece of it, but the start to finish. 

Now, when you take the next fact into consideration, this becomes even more interesting. Think about next-generation shoppers, the Gen Z-ers. A vast majority of them—an overwhelming majority of them, based on an MIT study we got access to—still shop in-store. And the expectations that these customers have from the brands that they shop with is not what they were like five years ago. 

And that’s the complexity that we’re in the process of solving. Consumers like shopping in-store because they like the tactile, the sensory touch, the communal feeling that one gets when you’re shopping in-store. We fundamentally believe that consumers must see it to believe it, particularly when they’re shopping a certain set of products.

Number two—this is an interesting one—I think the word personalization has existed for a long time, and we actually deeply believe physical commerce will get personalized even more. 

Now, one would say doing this in the digital realm is somewhat possible, and to a large degree even happens in the current world. But doing it in the physical world is a lot more complex because, more often than not, a retailer most likely won’t even know who the consumer that’s in the store is until they reach the last leg of the commerce journey, which is a payment. 

If somebody walks into the store, browses and walks out, most likely the retailer doesn’t even know what just happened. Again, the empirical data suggests—and this is a McKinsey study—close to 70% of the consumers expect a very personalized experience. And what is even more interesting is there’s strong empirical evidence that when the in-store shopping experience is personalized, the conversion rates are really, really better, almost to the tune of 30%–40%. 

Well, that’s a lot, right? Particularly for retailers, conversion rates are the holy grail. So, physical commerce will get personalized. We have a deep faith in this space. And when shopping feels personal, customers feel seen. They feel remembered. They feel rewarded. And that’s when the brand really relates to a consumer because they understand the loyalty. 

So maybe the third trend to touch on a little bit is, in the omnichannel world, the experience is a continuum. And maybe the word that’s worth stressing on a little bit is how we think about experience as a continuum, because omnichannel commerce has existed, will exist, and will continue to evolve. But a commerce journey that starts on a different channel can translate to—you know, a mobile can go to an online channel, evolve into a physical channel. 

That experience of shopping, starting from a channel, concluding in a third channel, is what we think of as a continuum in this space. And there’s, again, empirical evidence that suggests 73% of retail consumers are already omnichannel commerce. What this tells us is, well, the checkout may have happened on a given channel online and/or physical world. The actual commerce journey might have begun somewhere totally different.

We here at Verifone have a strong belief that we’re at the precipice of making the omnichannel dream a reality. Just to kind of summarize the key trends that we went through, what really generates consumer stickiness is a connected commerce journey that feels very personal when someone is shopping in any channel, including in-person, and when the shopping or the commerce experience feels like it’s one continuum across all these channels. 

Now, let me just play a video for you guys that hopefully gives you Verifone's perspective of how the complexity of the payments makes getting to this world a lot more complicated. Let's roll the video. 

[VIDEO] 

The world of payments is changing, fast. Digital transformation, new consumer expectations, and waves of innovation have reshaped commerce forever. But with more payment possibilities come more challenges. Endpoints are sprawling. 

Innovation is stuck in outdated systems. Global expansion is harder than ever, and consumer trust is eroding. This is the payment complexity trap. And for both merchants and commerce providers, complexity isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s a roadblock to growth. That's why Verifone is changing the game with boundless payments. 

Imagine a world where you could dazzle with innovation, block fraud before it happens, create lasting brand loyalty, and expand without limits. Verifone powers the world’s only boundless payments grid, a truly open, flexible, and scalable global payments ecosystem backed by Verifone’s unrivaled expertise. Verifone helps merchants and commerce providers power commerce without limits. 

The boundless payments grid is a global ecosystem that hides complexity with a single point of access to hundreds of integrations that remove barriers with global and hyperlocal modalities to open new markets effortlessly and that capture every new payment innovation. Verifone is more than a payments company. We are the front door to global commerce. The future of payments is boundless. 

RAJEEV YERUKALAPUDI: Terrific. At Verifone, we’ve been at the forefront of payments innovation for several decades. Now we’re super excited to bring all the innovation that has happened into the Stripe ecosystem, and we, in combination with Stripe, deeply believe in taking friction out of the payments process. Our common goal is to simplify payments, particularly in-store payments, in potentially four powerful ways: flexibility, security, accessibility, and ruggedization.

We believe they are core tenets for what makes the card-present, particularly hardware platform, the most robust in this world. We're going to touch on each of them really quickly.

So let’s start with flexibility. Well, this is really critical in today’s commerce landscape. You could be a coffee shop that has a payment terminal that fits right on the countertop. You could be a store that offers a very personalized, let’s say, a curbside pickup experience through a portable device. You could be an unattended merchant that actually has no one attending to the device, and it’s kind of out in the weather. Or it could be a retailer with multiple checkout lanes with a multiline checkout device. Our devices are built to adapt to every merchant use case. 

Not only that, our devices are built to give consumers the choice of how they want to make a payment. Could be a swipe, could be a dip or a tap, but, more importantly, it could be a myriad of payment methods that one may choose to use. And translating that into a connected experience—things like scan to pay, things like integrated loyalty experiences—where, through one interaction, a consumer gets to do multiple actions, starting from potentially making a payment to even earning or, in some cases, even redeeming loyalty. 

Our devices go wherever consumers go. They are connected to the ecosystem through a multitude of different ways. Could be wi-fi, could be cellular, 4G or 5G, or could even be through bluetooth. Probably last but not least, what is very interesting about these is we almost think of them with the large digital displays and responsive touchscreens. 

Gone are those days when they are just payment terminals. We almost think of them as consumer digital engagement platforms because there’s a lot that can be done at the moment of commerce, which is payment.

Let's look at the second one, security. This, in this day and age, is almost nonnegotiable. And it’s very, very heart and center to everything we do here at Verifone. 

Our devices are engineered with a whole host of advanced protections built in. Just to call out a few examples, we take immense pride in a lot of skimming detection, when a hardware and/or software on the device is tampered. All our devices are GPS-enabled, so you always know the location of the device, and that in itself is a vector that leads to a lot of sort of fraud in the hardware space. Our devices are obviously PCI-compatible but come with a whole host of security natively built into the hardware platform in itself.

Third, accessibility. Now this is an interesting one, and we take a lot of pride in this space in particular. We believe the great payment experiences should be inclusive, particularly for those that are visually impaired. That’s why we believe we’re setting a new standard for accessibility. 

We adhere to ADA North America, and we also comply with European as well as UK standards, the Royal National Institute of Blind [People], and we actually believe this is a very, very strong competitive edge for not only us but also the partnership.

Last but not least, ruggedization. Now, this is also an interesting one. Our devices are ruggedized for nearly every real-world use case. 

Think stadiums, think bars, think things unattended that are exposed to all the elements of nature. From retail pop-ups to stadium stands, our hardware is engineered to withstand the wear and tear that some of these devices go through on a day-to-day basis. Now if I put that into a more technical specification, our devices are IP-graded, and we have a series of devices ranging from IP53 all the way to IP67. Those are the types of devices that you can throw into a swimming pool and they’d still work. 

Now, you know, just to kind of summarize some of the key tenets of how we think about the hardware platform—flexibility, security, accessibility, and ruggedization. We believe Verifone is in the process of removing barriers to great payment experiences, making them more secure and more seamless wherever merchants need them. Not only do we have a great portfolio of devices, we actually know how to scale in the payments ecosystem. 

We believe we’re the doorway to global commerce, and we have partnered with many different facets of the payments ecosystem for several decades. We work with large enterprise merchants, we work with several ISOs, many different software and SaaS players, ISVs, as well as large fintechs, and Stripe is the best example of that, including other banks and acquirers.

The below scorecard you’re about to see hopefully tells the story a little bit more in-depth. We have an order of magnitude of 38 to 40 million devices in the field today accepting payments globally. These devices have done an order of magnitude of $8 trillion of commerce. You can compute the market share. It’s a large swath of the card-present ecosystem all over the globe, and our devices as we speak today are functioning in roughly about 165-plus countries. 

And when you think about where and what segments these devices have great presence, just to give you a few examples: 18 out of the top 20 grocery chains; almost 75 of the top 100 merchants when you stack running them based on volume; as well as petro, nine out of nine major oil chains use Verifone Stack for accepting card-present payments today.

Now let’s come to the partnership of Verifone and Stripe. 

Verifone and Stripe are partnering together to simplify and remove friction from the payments process. By combining Stripe’s powerful payment processing platform, as well as all the value-added services, with our industry-leading hardware expertise and platform, we believe we’re making it easier to deliver convenient, consistent, and secure payment experiences to our merchants as well as their consumers. 

At the heart of this partnership between Verifone and Stripe is a shared commitment to making payments work better for everyone in the ecosystem. Now let’s look at how all of this comes to life, maybe through an example. Meet Dan, a persona. Let’s say Dan always wanted to buy a drone from a retail store that he’s always wanted to go to. 

Now when Dan shows up at the store, as we said, he can tap his phone to make a payment at a countertop, or he could pick up the product in an aisle, or he could even self-checkout through a self-checkout kiosk if that’s offered. There’s a whole host of options that can be made available. Now, as his payment journey begins, the first thing that happens is, naturally, all the payment credentials are very securely encrypted and are transmitted to Stripe in this example for processing. 

Now, to complicate this example, let’s maybe take a use case of, say, Dan is visiting from UK instead of living in the USA, which means he may have a cross-border card, which means the transaction—the currency of the transaction—can be dynamically converted, and Dan may have an option to pay either in his native currency, which is pounds, or in US dollars. Now we actually believe—given the power of Stripe’s platform and how it controls the fraud, which naturally gives merchants a lot more room to play with the dollars—there may be a lot richer rewards. 

There may be excellent service that is offered to Dan. So overall, it’s a phenomenal experience. And Dan’s transaction is naturally then processed by Stripe, and the payment is therefore frictionless. It only takes seconds to authorize Dan’s purchase, and the transaction is, in real time, populated on the merchant-facing dashboards on Stripe Connect, whereby a merchant or retailer in this example could naturally see all the data between card-present and card-not-present in one single cohesive experience. 

Now, Dan also has several other options to choose how he may get a receipt between printing a receipt in store—it could be an e-receipt—or many other forms of how he wants to receive the acknowledgement back.

In short, we believe Verifone and Stripe are partnering to power the payments anywhere and everywhere. We’re not just processing payments. We’re enhancing them wherever the payment journey happens.

As I mentioned earlier today, the payments landscape is complex, and there is an enormous amount of complexity in this space. Yet, amidst all this complexity, there’s only one single goal, which is consumers will always prioritize convenience over everything else. 

And that’s where the partnership comes together. Verifone and Stripe, combining our expertise and innovation in this space, we believe we’re shaping the future of commerce, making it easier and more efficient for merchants as well as the consumers that they actually serve. We believe we’re uniquely positioned to redefine the future of commerce together. And the slide in front of you gives you the scale of both great partners side-by-side.

I don't have to hopefully read out all the stats, but massive players in the ecosystem and the combination of it is what makes it a very scaled, very secure, and phenomenal environment for retailers as well as software companies to sort of build the greatest payment experiences in this world for their merchants and the consumers that they serve. Thank you very much.