KEVIN CARSON: Thank you. It’s definitely brighter than I thought it was going to be. So firstly, I’ll just start off with a short introduction—a little bit about myself, a little bit about FreedomPay—and then we’ll kind of take a slow walk through the presentation. This afternoon’s presentation has been titled “Payments Reimagined,” which is about connecting experiences, driving growth in a unified commerce world. So hopefully the presentation will explain away the title. 

So first of all, thanks to John and Barbara and the team from Stripe for inviting FreedomPay. We’ve been partnering with Stripe now for just going on a year, and it’s an exciting partnership, one that we at FreedomPay are really fully committed to and hope to continue to develop. 

A little bit about myself. So as my rather long title describes, I’m our Senior Vice President for Global Business Development. If you say that backwards, my job is to develop our business globally—so around the world—taking FreedomPay to new places, new corners of the world, taking our platform out with our major customers. 

Personally, I’ve been at FreedomPay for just going on seven years now. In a former life, this body played football—soccer for any of you Americans in the room. And as you can hear, and maybe struggling with at this point, I’m definitely Scottish, not Irish, for anyone that was thinking. Just watching the presentations today and listening, if any of you guys out there are true AI geniuses, then I challenge you to find an AI agent that can understand this accent. Okay, let’s see how you get on. Once you’ve done that, I’ll believe the hype. I’ll believe the hype. 

So a little bit about FreedomPay. We’re a global leader in omnichannel and in-store payments, supporting leading brands around the world, and we’ll talk a little bit about that as we walk through the presentation. So the future of payments will be about wider optionality, flexibility, and innovation. 

And through the keynotes this morning, through a number of the breakout sessions, we’re starting to learn how Stripe as an organization are really focused on sorting out that growing complexity for merchants. And we at FreedomPay have our own philosophy around handling that deep complexity. 

We’re looking at how do we unlock more value for consumers by offering more choices, whether that’s choices in how the consumer wants to pay, choices in their experiences, choices in how they’re rewarded. We want to assure frictionless, safe, and secure consumer experiences. So when Kevin the Consumer is shopping or traveling, I want to ensure that at all times I’m safe, secure, and I’m getting things that are relevant to me. And lastly, we want to create a unified 360-degree view of that consumer. 

So how are we going to do that? So I’d like to tell you a little bit about the partnership between FreedomPay and Stripe. This partnership combines leading commerce orchestration with enterprise-grade payments to enable seamless customer experiences across all channels, growing revenue, scaling globally, and with a real aim of overhauling that without having to overhaul that existing payment stack. 

I talked a little bit about in-store payments. In-store payments is really, really tough, right? When you are challenged with a global brand to deploy in 113 markets, that takes a lot of planning, it takes a lot of technical expertise, it takes a lot of operational excellence. The partnership with FreedomPay and Stripe will enable merchants now to meet customers. 

You as the merchant, anywhere you are in your journey—if you’re at the beginning of a transformation and you just want to solve a simple problem, like tokenizing all your transactions and getting the minimum level of security—we can support you with that. Or if you’re an end-to-end transformation of your business, looking to digitalize, bring your consumer experience and build loyalty programs, this partnership allows for those to meet you at any one of those points in your journey. 

The partnership provides a cure for fragmented infrastructure and consolidating data. What does that mean? That means that in the payments world today, and for consumers and merchants at the cutting edge, they have many, many different ways—whether it’s different hardware options, different acquirers in different parts of the world; they’ve got different fraud and compliance measures going on; and they’ve got the really tough question of internationalization—“How do I take my business all around the world?” 

This partnership allows that consolidation of data, that consolidation of infrastructure, so that the merchant can expand at pace, and safely and securely. 

And lastly, in really simple terms, it allows flexibility for users. There was a lot of talk this morning about bringing in different data sets, acquiring data sets from different parts around the world. Our partnership allows that flexibility, allows existing FreedomPay customers to maintain and leverage their current infrastructure, their devices that they may have already installed with us, but allows them now to partner up with Stripe as a processor acquirer and as a payments platform in the background. 

So what does this partnership enable you, the merchant, or you as the ISV to do? Well, firstly, it will allow you to spend a lot of time with me. I’m good fun, I promise. But in all seriousness, this will allow you to unify commerce across all channels and create those seamless consumer experiences. 

So with Stripe’s payment suite, including leading payment processing, online fraud protection, and payment optimization, from a FreedomPay perspective, we’ll bring more than 1,000 different supported integrations for point-of-sale systems, for hardware, for loyalty programs, for gift cards, and more. And it allows you as the merchant to grow your revenue, scale globally without overhauling that existing infrastructure. 

So why FreedomPay? Why is FreedomPay at the table here? And why are we the choice for major merchants around the world? Well, our platform at its core is really best-in-class orchestration, unifying not only POS systems, but payment providers, different loyalty programs, private label cards, gift cards, and customer analytics. 

I mentioned some of those integrations earlier. The numbers jumped to 1,200 between the last slide and now; it shows you how fast we’re growing. FreedomPay has all of those endpoints. If you don’t understand those endpoints today: when you’re in a restaurant, when you’re in a hotel, you’re using a point-of-sale system that is deployed to that property or to that restaurant. FreedomPay holds a depth of integrations going back some 25 years now, building those integrations and maintaining them with the major vendors around the world like Oracle, NCR, or CJIT. 

We deploy that out to an amazing customer base. Some mentioned here, like Subway, are on a global rollout with FreedomPay just now, deploying across all their markets. Marriott International are deployed in 77 markets with us today, with the aim of being at 113 by the time we finish their full global rollout. Today, that is somewhere around the 6,000 property mark and growing. 

With Starbucks, FreedomPay operates all across the United States today, running the franchisee program. And with Jumeirah, they’re one of the latest additions to our platform as we’ve expanded out into the UAE. We were successful in the recent RFP, and we’ve been deploying to their properties all across the region. 

Just a little bit about coverage. I’ve mentioned the number of countries we operate in today. That is around the 77 to 80 mark, give or take. Whether you count Scotland as a country—is it in the UK? I think it’s a country. I’ll go with a country. But you’ll see here that FreedomPay is really doing the hard yards. 

When we talk about the hard yards, that’s picking up the integrations to things like Interac in Canada, EFTPOS in Australia, the Redsys network in Spain, Girocard in Germany, Cartes Bancaires in France. These are, for anyone that really understands payments and in-store payments, these are the really tough networks to get into. They’re tough to deploy to; they’re tough to integrate to. 

But FreedomPay, on behalf of our customers, on behalf of our partners, are doing those really hard yards and are really committed to globalizing the solution, whether it’s in-store, online—but in this case in particular, for those local debit methods you can see on the map today. 

So kind of just in summary, the FreedomPay and Stripe partnership is a real huge priority for FreedomPay as an organization. Hopefully, through the presentations today, you’ve seen that Stripe is taking the FreedomPay partnership very seriously as well. We’re down on the floor. I’m available for questions in a second. But really, just to summarize where we are with this partnership, it is truly one partnership. For you as a merchant or a partner, it would be one integration. And that will allow you to unify commerce across all your channels, creating those seamless customer experiences. 

We are ambitious organizations. FreedomPay is a privately held organization, but we are super ambitious in how we want to operate and the success that we want to deliver for our customers. And Stripe, they are—as you can see—an amazing organization. That innovation for innovative technology, I think, will keep pushing us forward and keep the partnership front and center for the years to come. 

And on that, we’ll finish off just with a little quote. This is from Chris, our boss. But I think it really just highlights what I’ve been saying throughout this, that we are really excited about this. This is an exciting partnership. We know it’s together for major enterprises, FreedomPay, and Stripe can deliver a truly unified commerce solution.

And I will round off with any questions? Thank you.