At MPE 2026, Ashley Paulus, Head of UK and Europe for Checkout.com, spoke about the company’s laser focus on driving merchant profitability and expansion into new markets. As one of the world’s leading PSPs, independently rated among the top three PSPs alongside Stripe and Adyen.
Checkout.com operates on a revenue-share, partnership model with their merchants and Paulus emphasized that their singular goal is to increase merchant revenue by improving payment acceptance rates, lowering the cost of funds, and helping with internal reconciliation.
This performance-driven approach yielded significant results in 2025, which marked the company’s first full year of profitability with Checkout.com processing over $300 billion in transactions and achieved 30% year-on-year growth for the second year in a row. For 2026, the strategy is built around expansion and innovation, including doubling down on the U.S. market, securing their own domestic processing license while also committing to Agentic Commerce. This Agentic push involves internal KPIs for every employee to use AI and preparing merchant solutions for agentic processing as the technology matures.
Finally, reflecting on her first time at the MPE conference, Paulus praised the event for attracting payments experts who are “deep in the weeds” and appreciated the opportunity to meet directly with merchants and offer utility as they develop their payments strategies for 2026.
