December 18, 2025 • 18 mins
Growth shouldn’t stall at the border. We sit down with Peter Dougherty, President of Spreedly, to unpack how an open payments platform helps global brands launch faster, reduce vendor risk, and optimize authorization rates without ripping out their stack. Peter traces the evolution from card‑centric orchestration to a broader layer that now includes tokenization, a secure token vault, fraud and KYC options, and connections to multiple processors and alternative payment methods. The takeaway: best‑of‑breed no longer means complexity and long timelines - it means resilience, data‑driven choices, and faster expansion.
Peter also looks ahead to a future where agents become the front end of commerce. Discovery, selection, and purchase compress into milliseconds, and payments infrastructure has to keep up. We dig into how mandates, consent, and spending limits will work when agents transact on our behalf; how liability flows when something goes wrong; and why token management becomes the backbone for secure, delegated payments. He shares why platforms that can safely feed agents with PCI‑sensitive data will win as volumes surge across regions and rails.
We ground the hype in reality too. Payments is the fastest moving oil tanker - innovation is constant, but adoption takes time. EMV took decades; stablecoins still trail cards and the fastest‑growing APMs. For leaders, the smart move is to build behind an abstraction layer that lets you A/B test processors, adopt new methods, and swap tools without disruption.
If you’re pushing into new markets or preparing for agentic commerce, this conversation will help you rethink checkout, time to market, and resilience at scale.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_00 (00:00):
Welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast,
where we talk to sea levelleaders from across the payments
landscape.
We'll be discussing the productsand services that impact the
payment space today, as well astrends and predictions for the
future of payments.
We will also hear stories fromour guests about their journeys
to the top.
SPEAKER_02 (00:18):
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Leaders in
Payments Podcast.
I'm your host, Greg Myers, andtoday's special guest is Peter
Doherty, the president ofSpreedly.
So, Peter, thank you so much forbeing here and welcome to the
show.
Awesome.
Thanks for having me, Greg.
It's good to be here.
So before we dive into yourcareer and the company, can you
give us a quick snapshot of yourpersonal background, maybe where
you grew up, where you call hometoday, a few things like that?
SPEAKER_01 (00:39):
Yeah.
So from Montreal, grew up inMontreal in Canada.
That's where I'm wearing my nicewinter Christmas sweater at the
moment, you know.
We actually just had our companyChristmas, we did a Christmas
team lunch, which was very nice.
And so grew up in Montreal,always, always been in tech in
Montreal, spent most or thefoundational part of my career
at a call it a card presentpayment startup called
Lightspeed Commerce in the inthe POS space for 12 years,
(01:01):
growing that business from 8million in revenue to 750
million revenue through IPO, etcetera.
And then a couple years agofound Spreebly, and I've been on
that journey journey since.
SPEAKER_02 (01:10):
Okay.
And prior to your first company,was that the first company, or
do you have other people?
SPEAKER_01 (01:17):
Yeah, that was my first real job.
You know, I was there for 12years.
I joined that business, 25 yearsold, salesperson, and I said,
hey, let's let's make a bet.
Let's do something fun and learnalong the way.
And I had the privilege ofrunning all the various
different go-to-marketfunctions, doing MA, running
teams internationally.
It's very rare that you kind ofget these unicorn companies that
go all the way from 8 million toa billion.
(01:39):
And I know there's some luck init, but I was very lucky that
that was the very first companyI ever worked for.
SPEAKER_02 (01:43):
Yeah.
What was uh attractive aboutSpreedly?
Why join Spreedly?
SPEAKER_01 (01:48):
Well, the problem that Spreadly solves was one of
the things that I faced at myprevious role.
And so at its core, asbusinesses start to grow, they
start to face this question ofhey, do I have problems in my
payment stack that are bigenough to warrant looking at
having multiple vendors powerthat or solve that problem for
(02:08):
me?
And Spreadly starts to starts toanswer that question by saying,
okay, if I want to have multiplefraud providers, multiple
payments processors, multipleopen banking providers, Spreadly
will power that for you,especially as you get to the
enterprise who are multi-region,multi-continent, multi-product,
multi-business line.
Spreadly sits in the middle andreally helps you start to
optimize your stack to get thebest out of every single bit of
(02:29):
your business.
SPEAKER_02 (02:30):
So if you had to give me the elevator pitch, what
would that sound like?
SPEAKER_01 (02:34):
Spreadly is an open payments platform that allows
merchants like HBO, Time Warner,BMW to grow their business and
increase their time to market innew regions or new lines of
business without having to makebig bets on what are the
components that go into theirpayment stack.
SPEAKER_02 (02:53):
Okay, well, what would you say is the biggest
challenge your company issolving for your customers right
now?
SPEAKER_01 (02:58):
First, it's time to market, like I mentioned.
When you have, and we'll justuse an example, if you're a US
business and you want to startselling into Mexico or to Canada
or to Europe, and you want tostart to think about, okay, how
do I get into these markets?
It often starts with, okay,well, what do I need to do to
sell into Mexico or the UK?
And that can involve compliance,regulatory, et cetera, but it
(03:20):
also often involves fulfillment.
How do I actually processpayments and fulfill orders in
that region?
And you might have differentregulatory regimes there, you
might have different consumerbehaviors.
You know, debit is obviouslymuch more used in continental
Europe than it is here in NorthAmerica.
And when you start to thinkabout how do I enter this new
region, more often than not,most vendors that you see in
(03:42):
your payment stack are reallygood at operating in a single
region.
Very few are good at operatingin multiple regions.
And so if you're gonna make abet by saying, oh, I'm gonna,
I'll make it up now, not to pickon them, but I'm gonna use
Barkley Card in the UK as mypayments processor, you're gonna
have to make a bet that they'regonna be the vendor versus my
existing vendor being reallygood in the UK.
(04:03):
Well, Spreadly will reduce thatrisk, that enterprise risk, to
go and adopt a new vendor, andmaybe you're gonna A-B test
between two different vendorsbefore you choose somebody for
the long term.
And I'm just using paymentsprocessing as an example.
It can be your KYC vendor, itcan be your open banking vendor,
it can be your premise processoritself.
There's a whole bunch ofcomponents that go into a
payment stack, and we help youreduce the risk of making those
(04:24):
decisions.
And frankly, make the decisionsfaster.
SPEAKER_02 (04:28):
So there's a buzzword out there,
orchestration.
Is that sort of what you'redescribing?
SPEAKER_01 (04:33):
Spreadly is the foundational brand or name in
payments orchestration.
We've been doing this now for15, 16 years.
I would say we are do paymentsorchestration, but it is now
only one of the things we do.
That's why we refer to ourselvesas an open payments platform.
Payments orchestration is verycard-centric.
Hey, I'm going to send thistransaction to PSP number one
(04:53):
and this transaction to PSP two.
That's what we started in.
We did that for 15 years.
We've done that very effectivelyfor our customers for 15 years,
and we continue to do that.
But tokenization and managingyour token vault is very
important, especially in the ageof agenti commerce, and how do
you actually feed PCI sensitivedata to agents to act on your
behalf?
That's a whole other businessline for us now.
Fraud and fraud managementthrough Spreeply Protect is
(05:16):
another business line for us.
And so payments orchestration isa single product, Spreeply
Connect.
That's where our company grewout of.
But now we offer a suite ofdifferent products that fill out
your payment stack beyond justpayments orchestration.
And that's the nuance betweenopen payments and payments
orchestration.
SPEAKER_02 (05:31):
Gotcha.
Okay, that makes a lot of sense.
So are most of your customers,would you say, mid-market and
national in size?
SPEAKER_01 (05:38):
We definitely started, you know, 15 years ago,
startups working in themid-market, maybe even a little
bit in the SMB.
But as time has gone by, notonly have we matured as an
organization, we see bigger andbigger brands trusting Spreebly
with their transaction volume.
Today there's 60 billion of GMVgoing through the platform every
year, so it's it's quite a bit.
And so our brand is more trustedin the market.
(05:59):
So we have the enterprise whouse Spreebly now.
And also, we've also shiftedfrom a market perspective, going
from call it the early adoptersof this idea of payments
orchestration, this niche thing,to now it's more, okay, we're in
the early majority.
It's much more mainstream.
So you're seeing much biggerbrands make the decision to move
towards this idea of openpayments.
SPEAKER_02 (06:19):
Well, what would you say differentiates you from your
competitors out there?
SPEAKER_01 (06:25):
I think first is Spreedly is always innovating.
We're always looking at what isthe payment stack holistically
and what does success look likefor a payments manager?
And so back to the uh you knowthe nuance between payments
orchestration and open payments.
Payments 10 years ago, when theidea of payments orchestration
was still new, was verycard-centric.
(06:46):
Then we saw the rise of APMs andLPMs, now tokenization is very
hot because of theAgentiCommerce and
AgentaCommerce's ravenous hungerfor payments data to be able to
transact ever fast you know evermore frequently.
And so when we talk about whySpreadly is the right choice
when you're looking in for anopen payments platform, it is
(07:07):
because Spreadly provides aplatform that touches your
entire payment stack versus justbeing card-centric or just being
in a single region.
We've also been doing this forquite a while.
The infrastructure is enterprisegrade, and we have not only
innovative startups in themid-market who use Spreebly, but
we also have blue chip nameslike a priceline or an HBO or
the New York Times that useSpreadly as well.
(07:28):
And so we our platform can flexfrom an aspirational business
doing$250 million a year andreally growing very aggressively
to a global enterprise.
SPEAKER_02 (07:36):
Okay.
Well, let's talk a little bitabout the future.
Where do you see the biggestgrowth opportunity in your
segment of payments?
SPEAKER_01 (07:43):
Not to be cliche, but agents is the way.
When we talk about the future ofpayments, even ignoring Spreebly
for a second, we're talkingabout how are agents going to
transact on my behalf.
If I'm a consumer and I'mlooking for a pair of shoes, you
know, I go to Adidas.com and I'mgoing to go browse and look
around and try and pick a pairof shoes.
(08:04):
And maybe this is just mebecause sometimes I shop too
much.
I'm going to spend an hour doingthat.
If in the world of agents,you're going to say, hey, I need
a new pair of sneakers, andthey're going to look at all of
my past history, they're goingto look at my preferences, et
cetera.
And they're going to make a snapdecision within half a second.
And they're going to transact sorapidly.
And so when we talk about thefuture of payments, it's about
(08:27):
the agents being the front endof commerce.
But for the paymentsinfrastructure providers like
us, it's going to be how do wefeed agents to transact more
effectively, but also help themfulfill their mandates on behalf
of the consumers that theyrepresent.
That is fundamentally the futureof payments that we're headed
towards, which I'm very excitedabout.
Then you start to get into thewhole question of does the
infrastructure that's out theretoday of the card brands and the
(08:49):
alternate payment methods, arethey ready to support that?
What we think is going to bethis tremendous boom in
transaction volumes that aretransacting on the internet.
Not that there already isn't alot, but you think humans shop
fast and e-commerce is fast,just wait till agents start
making billions of dollars oftransactions in milliseconds.
It's kind of like the differencebetween the New York Stock
Exchange 20 years ago withtraders on the floor to, you
(09:11):
know, today it's allprogrammatic trading and the
velocity that happens.
That's what's about to hite-commerce.
SPEAKER_02 (09:16):
Yeah, it's interesting because I have a lot
of these discussions, and I'mcurious your thoughts.
Like, do you see a difference inlike a gentic commerce versus
the payments?
Like to me, they're sort of twoseparate things, right?
Because the commerce part is thesearch, the discoverability, the
fulfillment, and the payments iskind of what we traditionally
think as a transaction goingthrough.
(09:36):
I mean, do you see it that wayor do you see it differently?
SPEAKER_01 (09:39):
Yes and no.
So commerce for sure is how doyou discover products?
How do you choose what pair ofsneakers are you gonna buy?
Are you gonna buy a pair ofNikes or a pair of Adidas?
And then how does it getfulfilled?
That's that's not the paymentsinfrastructure.
But payments and the paymenttransaction is integral to that
whole experience.
And yes, the agent is solvingfor product discoverability.
(10:02):
Are you gonna find some newbrand that you've never bought
from before?
They're gonna make sure that theshipping address is right.
But in the transaction, theagent still needs to manage the
transaction.
And that's why you see the largeLLM providers like OpenAI and
Google, both of them over thelast six months have put out
agent payment protocols,different than you know, MCP.
(10:22):
That's that's more the datatransaction.
We're talking about the paymentsprotocols for agents.
Because for that commercetransaction to happen, once
you've figured out or once theagent has figured out what pair
of shoes you're gonna buy, youstill have to execute the
payment.
And the agent has to have theauthority, which we need to be
sure of from the consumer.
They need to know is the agentauthorized to spend?
If I give it a budget of$100 andthey want to spend$120, it needs
(10:44):
to go back to the human forapproval.
But the future of agents is thatmight happen without the
approval.
And then that what is called amandate has to be transferred to
the to the to the merchant to beable to, okay, I accept this
mandate, I'm gonna ship theshoes.
Because conversely, here's agood question.
What if the agent buys the wrongthing or makes a mistake, it's
the wrong size, it's the wrongcolor?
(11:05):
Who's responsible?
And the consumer does achargeback.
That's transaction, that'spayments infrastructure.
So that's why it's it's yes andno.
I agree with you.
It's commerce versustransactions, but the
transaction is integral tocommerce.
SPEAKER_02 (11:20):
Yeah, I love the analogy or explanation.
I think you're spot on.
So, what does success look likefor your company over the next,
say, three to five years?
SPEAKER_01 (11:29):
Spreadly is a growth business.
We've been doing this for 15, 20years now, and we're still at
what we feel is we're at thevery beginning of this massive
change in the payment space.
Open payments as an idea whereyou have a single provider to
provide the software for yourentire payment stack is still a
relatively new idea in the sensethat you might have multiple
providers behind Spreedly.
(11:49):
And we're growing very nicely,our GMV is growing very nicely.
We have Blue Chip logos signingup for Spreadly.
And we'd have this belief thatwe're still at the very early
innings of what could be amassive market.
And this is the transformationof payments infrastructure
being, okay, I'm gonna go to onevendor and get everything.
You know, we saw that throughthe rise of mobile and the rise
(12:10):
of brands like Stripe andAddion, great businesses, by the
way, but just from a you knowdifferent different type of
problem that they solved.
To now, okay, the simplicity ofdoing a best of breed approach
is there's a much higher degreeof simplicity now instead of
having to go and find fivedifferent vendors to solve this
problem.
And that's really the future forSpreadly is abstracting away the
(12:30):
complexity of beingmulti-region, being best of
breed in your payment stack, andreducing the risk, by the way,
of maybe making the wrong vendorchoice.
Because no vendor is the best ateverything.
SPEAKER_02 (12:39):
So I know we've probably answered this question,
but I'm sure there are moretrends out there.
But what do you think are thebiggest trends that are
reshaping the payments industryright now?
SPEAKER_01 (12:48):
Some people hate it when I say this, but payments as
a space is like the fastestmoving oil tanker you've ever
seen.
It's this huge business.
The TAM of payments is huge.
It's one of the biggest marketsin the world.
And it's moving really fast.
And that's actually one of thethings personally I love about
the space.
There's so much happening allthe time, but it also takes a
really long time for innovationto kind of propagate through the
(13:09):
system.
Took us 20 years to roll out EMVchip cards in the US, you know?
Yeah, I have to.
How long do we talk about thatfor?
Forever.
But it's a great example of likeit's super innovative, great
technology, but it takes foreverto roll out.
And so, you know, there's thiskind of view of like payments is
super innovative, fast changing,which is true.
There's always lots ofheadlines.
But for it to actually make itout completely to the market, a
(13:32):
new technology to make its wayout to the market, really does
take quite a while.
That's what I mean by it's thefastest moving oil tanker you've
ever seen.
When you're running a companylike Spreebly, that's an
innovator in the space.
You have to keep up with all thechanges.
You know, we just talked aboutthe two new protocols from
OpenAI and Google and all that.
But how long does it take forthe enterprise to adopt it?
That might take a while.
And so balancing the innovation,being a software innovator with
(13:54):
being a successful, profitablecompany, that you've got to be a
little bit realistic about howfast the enterprise is going to
adopt some great new technology,not that it's bad, is one of the
interesting things for Spoodley.
Great example.
You know, we just talked aboutagents and agents being the new
front end of commerce.
Merchants, e-commerce teams havebuilt, spent lots of money
building really powerful,optimized front ends.
You know, if you go toMacy's.com, that's an e-commerce
(14:16):
engine for Macy's.
The front end is gonna go to,and I'm a Gemini user, less of a
ChatGPT user, like it's going toGemini and asking for something.
Hey, maybe Macy's has that.
That's the new front end.
And that's some of the truedisruption we're gonna see in
the space, where the front endof commerce is now the LLM
interface, and we as theinfrastructure providers have to
(14:37):
feed those versus call it themerchant's native, native
website.
SPEAKER_02 (14:42):
So besides AI and agentic commerce, agentic
payments, however you want tophrase it, the other big one
that that I often hear about arestable coins.
So just curious your thoughts onthat.
SPEAKER_01 (14:52):
I think crypto is an amazing technology, but I also
think it's a technology that hasnot reached wide adoption from a
payments, e-commerce transactionperspective.
And again, it's from anengineering technology
perspective, it is actuallyreally, really cool stuff.
But you don't really see a tonof adoption from the consumer
market.
The credit card is still king.
Now, APMs and LPMs are areactually growing massively, even
(15:16):
here in the US.
But crypto is a distant fifth orsixth or seventh.
It's not even third or fourth.
And so I think there's a lot ofreally exciting hype, and
there's a lot of great stuffthat's happening in the space,
don't get me wrong.
But it is one of those topics,and maybe it's going to be like
EMV, where in 20 years it'sactually the number one, but
it's going to take another 10,15 years.
(15:37):
I think that's the unfortunatetruth for that pro for that
technology.
SPEAKER_02 (15:41):
Okay.
A couple of final questions.
So if you could go back and giveyourself advice at the start of
your career, what would that be?
SPEAKER_01 (15:50):
I would say it's believe in your convictions and
stick with your convictions.
When you're young and you'restarting and you're learning,
you're really just learning andyou're in it to learn and try
new things and do new things andfail and pick yourself up and
try again.
But sometimes you're right andyou let somebody else lead you
down the wrong road.
(16:10):
And when you're young and youhad don't have a ton of
experience, that's always that'salways the balance of like when
do I stick with what I think isright versus, hey, like I got my
whole life ahead of me, I'mgonna try something different.
And if it fails, it fails.
You know, and so that balance issomething that as you get older
and more experienced, you getbetter at, right?
And so understanding thatbalance and having advice to
myself, you know, Peter 15 yearsago, would definitely be
(16:32):
something I would focus on.
And I would say sometimes it'strust your gut.
That's the other thing, is is asa leader, you often just kind of
know something implicitly.
You don't know why, but you do.
And sometimes it's it's theright thing to just trust that
intuition.
SPEAKER_02 (16:46):
Okay, I love that answer.
So what's the one thing thatpayments leaders that are
listening to this show today,what should they be thinking
about right now?
SPEAKER_01 (16:55):
And I'll skip over Agenda Commerce because we've
we've beat we flogged that one.
Okay.
Because that is the number one.
Also, as just somebody who lovesinnovation and technology, I
think it's just so cool what'shappening.
But I would say it's don't getwrapped up too much in the hype
and remember that it took 20years to roll out EMV.
(17:16):
And it's great innovation isreally important.
And I believe in software.
If you're not innovating, you'redead, simply put.
It's just a question of when.
And in payments, it's thefastest moving oil tanker you
ever saw.
And sometimes change takeslonger than you think.
SPEAKER_02 (17:29):
Okay, so anything that you want to leave the
audience related to Spreadly,what would you want them to
remember from this podcast aboutthe company?
SPEAKER_01 (17:36):
Spreadly is always innovating.
We are at the very beginning ofthis wave of mass adoption of
this idea that best of breed isno longer complicated to
implement.
It's about abstracting the way,abstracting away the complexity
of operating in multiple regionsacross multiple maybe business
lines in the same region, maybea medium risk and a low-risk
(17:58):
business.
And all of these things now canbe had from a single provider.
And we are the go-to brand, orwe are the leader for companies
that are looking to build theirrevenue or grow their revenue
globally.
That growth and that time tomarket is what we are great at.
SPEAKER_02 (18:19):
Okay, well, I think that's a great way to wrap up
the show.
So, Peter, thank you so much forbeing here today.
I know your time is veryvaluable, so I really appreciate
the time and for you being onthe podcast today.
Awesome.
Well, thanks for having me,Greg.
It was a good time.
And to all you listeners outthere, I thank you for your time
as well.
And until the next story.
SPEAKER_00 (18:36):
Thank you for joining us this week on the
Leaders in Payments Podcast.
Make sure you visit our websiteat leadersinpayments.com, where
you can subscribe to the showand where you'll find our show
notes.
If you enjoyed listening, pleaseshare on your social channels as
well.
Welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast,
where we talk to sea levelleaders from across the payments
landscape.
We'll be discussing the productsand services that impact the
payment space today, as well astrends and predictions for the
future of payments.
We will also hear stories fromour guests about their journeys
to the top.
SPEAKER_02 (00:18):
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Leaders in
Payments Podcast.
I'm your host, Greg Myers, andtoday's special guest is Peter
Doherty, the president ofSpreedly.
So, Peter, thank you so much forbeing here and welcome to the
show.
Awesome.
Thanks for having me, Greg.
It's good to be here.
So before we dive into yourcareer and the company, can you
give us a quick snapshot of yourpersonal background, maybe where
you grew up, where you call hometoday, a few things like that?
SPEAKER_01 (00:39):
Yeah.
So from Montreal, grew up inMontreal in Canada.
That's where I'm wearing my nicewinter Christmas sweater at the
moment, you know.
We actually just had our companyChristmas, we did a Christmas
team lunch, which was very nice.
And so grew up in Montreal,always, always been in tech in
Montreal, spent most or thefoundational part of my career
at a call it a card presentpayment startup called
Lightspeed Commerce in the inthe POS space for 12 years,
(01:01):
growing that business from 8million in revenue to 750
million revenue through IPO, etcetera.
And then a couple years agofound Spreebly, and I've been on
that journey journey since.
SPEAKER_02 (01:10):
Okay.
And prior to your first company,was that the first company, or
do you have other people?
SPEAKER_01 (01:17):
Yeah, that was my first real job.
You know, I was there for 12years.
I joined that business, 25 yearsold, salesperson, and I said,
hey, let's let's make a bet.
Let's do something fun and learnalong the way.
And I had the privilege ofrunning all the various
different go-to-marketfunctions, doing MA, running
teams internationally.
It's very rare that you kind ofget these unicorn companies that
go all the way from 8 million toa billion.
(01:39):
And I know there's some luck init, but I was very lucky that
that was the very first companyI ever worked for.
SPEAKER_02 (01:43):
Yeah.
What was uh attractive aboutSpreedly?
Why join Spreedly?
SPEAKER_01 (01:48):
Well, the problem that Spreadly solves was one of
the things that I faced at myprevious role.
And so at its core, asbusinesses start to grow, they
start to face this question ofhey, do I have problems in my
payment stack that are bigenough to warrant looking at
having multiple vendors powerthat or solve that problem for
(02:08):
me?
And Spreadly starts to starts toanswer that question by saying,
okay, if I want to have multiplefraud providers, multiple
payments processors, multipleopen banking providers, Spreadly
will power that for you,especially as you get to the
enterprise who are multi-region,multi-continent, multi-product,
multi-business line.
Spreadly sits in the middle andreally helps you start to
optimize your stack to get thebest out of every single bit of
(02:29):
your business.
SPEAKER_02 (02:30):
So if you had to give me the elevator pitch, what
would that sound like?
SPEAKER_01 (02:34):
Spreadly is an open payments platform that allows
merchants like HBO, Time Warner,BMW to grow their business and
increase their time to market innew regions or new lines of
business without having to makebig bets on what are the
components that go into theirpayment stack.
SPEAKER_02 (02:53):
Okay, well, what would you say is the biggest
challenge your company issolving for your customers right
now?
SPEAKER_01 (02:58):
First, it's time to market, like I mentioned.
When you have, and we'll justuse an example, if you're a US
business and you want to startselling into Mexico or to Canada
or to Europe, and you want tostart to think about, okay, how
do I get into these markets?
It often starts with, okay,well, what do I need to do to
sell into Mexico or the UK?
And that can involve compliance,regulatory, et cetera, but it
(03:20):
also often involves fulfillment.
How do I actually processpayments and fulfill orders in
that region?
And you might have differentregulatory regimes there, you
might have different consumerbehaviors.
You know, debit is obviouslymuch more used in continental
Europe than it is here in NorthAmerica.
And when you start to thinkabout how do I enter this new
region, more often than not,most vendors that you see in
(03:42):
your payment stack are reallygood at operating in a single
region.
Very few are good at operatingin multiple regions.
And so if you're gonna make abet by saying, oh, I'm gonna,
I'll make it up now, not to pickon them, but I'm gonna use
Barkley Card in the UK as mypayments processor, you're gonna
have to make a bet that they'regonna be the vendor versus my
existing vendor being reallygood in the UK.
(04:03):
Well, Spreadly will reduce thatrisk, that enterprise risk, to
go and adopt a new vendor, andmaybe you're gonna A-B test
between two different vendorsbefore you choose somebody for
the long term.
And I'm just using paymentsprocessing as an example.
It can be your KYC vendor, itcan be your open banking vendor,
it can be your premise processoritself.
There's a whole bunch ofcomponents that go into a
payment stack, and we help youreduce the risk of making those
(04:24):
decisions.
And frankly, make the decisionsfaster.
SPEAKER_02 (04:28):
So there's a buzzword out there,
orchestration.
Is that sort of what you'redescribing?
SPEAKER_01 (04:33):
Spreadly is the foundational brand or name in
payments orchestration.
We've been doing this now for15, 16 years.
I would say we are do paymentsorchestration, but it is now
only one of the things we do.
That's why we refer to ourselvesas an open payments platform.
Payments orchestration is verycard-centric.
Hey, I'm going to send thistransaction to PSP number one
(04:53):
and this transaction to PSP two.
That's what we started in.
We did that for 15 years.
We've done that very effectivelyfor our customers for 15 years,
and we continue to do that.
But tokenization and managingyour token vault is very
important, especially in the ageof agenti commerce, and how do
you actually feed PCI sensitivedata to agents to act on your
behalf?
That's a whole other businessline for us now.
Fraud and fraud managementthrough Spreeply Protect is
(05:16):
another business line for us.
And so payments orchestration isa single product, Spreeply
Connect.
That's where our company grewout of.
But now we offer a suite ofdifferent products that fill out
your payment stack beyond justpayments orchestration.
And that's the nuance betweenopen payments and payments
orchestration.
SPEAKER_02 (05:31):
Gotcha.
Okay, that makes a lot of sense.
So are most of your customers,would you say, mid-market and
national in size?
SPEAKER_01 (05:38):
We definitely started, you know, 15 years ago,
startups working in themid-market, maybe even a little
bit in the SMB.
But as time has gone by, notonly have we matured as an
organization, we see bigger andbigger brands trusting Spreebly
with their transaction volume.
Today there's 60 billion of GMVgoing through the platform every
year, so it's it's quite a bit.
And so our brand is more trustedin the market.
(05:59):
So we have the enterprise whouse Spreebly now.
And also, we've also shiftedfrom a market perspective, going
from call it the early adoptersof this idea of payments
orchestration, this niche thing,to now it's more, okay, we're in
the early majority.
It's much more mainstream.
So you're seeing much biggerbrands make the decision to move
towards this idea of openpayments.
SPEAKER_02 (06:19):
Well, what would you say differentiates you from your
competitors out there?
SPEAKER_01 (06:25):
I think first is Spreedly is always innovating.
We're always looking at what isthe payment stack holistically
and what does success look likefor a payments manager?
And so back to the uh you knowthe nuance between payments
orchestration and open payments.
Payments 10 years ago, when theidea of payments orchestration
was still new, was verycard-centric.
(06:46):
Then we saw the rise of APMs andLPMs, now tokenization is very
hot because of theAgentiCommerce and
AgentaCommerce's ravenous hungerfor payments data to be able to
transact ever fast you know evermore frequently.
And so when we talk about whySpreadly is the right choice
when you're looking in for anopen payments platform, it is
(07:07):
because Spreadly provides aplatform that touches your
entire payment stack versus justbeing card-centric or just being
in a single region.
We've also been doing this forquite a while.
The infrastructure is enterprisegrade, and we have not only
innovative startups in themid-market who use Spreebly, but
we also have blue chip nameslike a priceline or an HBO or
the New York Times that useSpreadly as well.
(07:28):
And so we our platform can flexfrom an aspirational business
doing$250 million a year andreally growing very aggressively
to a global enterprise.
SPEAKER_02 (07:36):
Okay.
Well, let's talk a little bitabout the future.
Where do you see the biggestgrowth opportunity in your
segment of payments?
SPEAKER_01 (07:43):
Not to be cliche, but agents is the way.
When we talk about the future ofpayments, even ignoring Spreebly
for a second, we're talkingabout how are agents going to
transact on my behalf.
If I'm a consumer and I'mlooking for a pair of shoes, you
know, I go to Adidas.com and I'mgoing to go browse and look
around and try and pick a pairof shoes.
(08:04):
And maybe this is just mebecause sometimes I shop too
much.
I'm going to spend an hour doingthat.
If in the world of agents,you're going to say, hey, I need
a new pair of sneakers, andthey're going to look at all of
my past history, they're goingto look at my preferences, et
cetera.
And they're going to make a snapdecision within half a second.
And they're going to transact sorapidly.
And so when we talk about thefuture of payments, it's about
(08:27):
the agents being the front endof commerce.
But for the paymentsinfrastructure providers like
us, it's going to be how do wefeed agents to transact more
effectively, but also help themfulfill their mandates on behalf
of the consumers that theyrepresent.
That is fundamentally the futureof payments that we're headed
towards, which I'm very excitedabout.
Then you start to get into thewhole question of does the
infrastructure that's out theretoday of the card brands and the
(08:49):
alternate payment methods, arethey ready to support that?
What we think is going to bethis tremendous boom in
transaction volumes that aretransacting on the internet.
Not that there already isn't alot, but you think humans shop
fast and e-commerce is fast,just wait till agents start
making billions of dollars oftransactions in milliseconds.
It's kind of like the differencebetween the New York Stock
Exchange 20 years ago withtraders on the floor to, you
(09:11):
know, today it's allprogrammatic trading and the
velocity that happens.
That's what's about to hite-commerce.
SPEAKER_02 (09:16):
Yeah, it's interesting because I have a lot
of these discussions, and I'mcurious your thoughts.
Like, do you see a difference inlike a gentic commerce versus
the payments?
Like to me, they're sort of twoseparate things, right?
Because the commerce part is thesearch, the discoverability, the
fulfillment, and the payments iskind of what we traditionally
think as a transaction goingthrough.
(09:36):
I mean, do you see it that wayor do you see it differently?
SPEAKER_01 (09:39):
Yes and no.
So commerce for sure is how doyou discover products?
How do you choose what pair ofsneakers are you gonna buy?
Are you gonna buy a pair ofNikes or a pair of Adidas?
And then how does it getfulfilled?
That's that's not the paymentsinfrastructure.
But payments and the paymenttransaction is integral to that
whole experience.
And yes, the agent is solvingfor product discoverability.
(10:02):
Are you gonna find some newbrand that you've never bought
from before?
They're gonna make sure that theshipping address is right.
But in the transaction, theagent still needs to manage the
transaction.
And that's why you see the largeLLM providers like OpenAI and
Google, both of them over thelast six months have put out
agent payment protocols,different than you know, MCP.
(10:22):
That's that's more the datatransaction.
We're talking about the paymentsprotocols for agents.
Because for that commercetransaction to happen, once
you've figured out or once theagent has figured out what pair
of shoes you're gonna buy, youstill have to execute the
payment.
And the agent has to have theauthority, which we need to be
sure of from the consumer.
They need to know is the agentauthorized to spend?
If I give it a budget of$100 andthey want to spend$120, it needs
(10:44):
to go back to the human forapproval.
But the future of agents is thatmight happen without the
approval.
And then that what is called amandate has to be transferred to
the to the to the merchant to beable to, okay, I accept this
mandate, I'm gonna ship theshoes.
Because conversely, here's agood question.
What if the agent buys the wrongthing or makes a mistake, it's
the wrong size, it's the wrongcolor?
(11:05):
Who's responsible?
And the consumer does achargeback.
That's transaction, that'spayments infrastructure.
So that's why it's it's yes andno.
I agree with you.
It's commerce versustransactions, but the
transaction is integral tocommerce.
SPEAKER_02 (11:20):
Yeah, I love the analogy or explanation.
I think you're spot on.
So, what does success look likefor your company over the next,
say, three to five years?
SPEAKER_01 (11:29):
Spreadly is a growth business.
We've been doing this for 15, 20years now, and we're still at
what we feel is we're at thevery beginning of this massive
change in the payment space.
Open payments as an idea whereyou have a single provider to
provide the software for yourentire payment stack is still a
relatively new idea in the sensethat you might have multiple
providers behind Spreedly.
(11:49):
And we're growing very nicely,our GMV is growing very nicely.
We have Blue Chip logos signingup for Spreadly.
And we'd have this belief thatwe're still at the very early
innings of what could be amassive market.
And this is the transformationof payments infrastructure
being, okay, I'm gonna go to onevendor and get everything.
You know, we saw that throughthe rise of mobile and the rise
(12:10):
of brands like Stripe andAddion, great businesses, by the
way, but just from a you knowdifferent different type of
problem that they solved.
To now, okay, the simplicity ofdoing a best of breed approach
is there's a much higher degreeof simplicity now instead of
having to go and find fivedifferent vendors to solve this
problem.
And that's really the future forSpreadly is abstracting away the
(12:30):
complexity of beingmulti-region, being best of
breed in your payment stack, andreducing the risk, by the way,
of maybe making the wrong vendorchoice.
Because no vendor is the best ateverything.
SPEAKER_02 (12:39):
So I know we've probably answered this question,
but I'm sure there are moretrends out there.
But what do you think are thebiggest trends that are
reshaping the payments industryright now?
SPEAKER_01 (12:48):
Some people hate it when I say this, but payments as
a space is like the fastestmoving oil tanker you've ever
seen.
It's this huge business.
The TAM of payments is huge.
It's one of the biggest marketsin the world.
And it's moving really fast.
And that's actually one of thethings personally I love about
the space.
There's so much happening allthe time, but it also takes a
really long time for innovationto kind of propagate through the
(13:09):
system.
Took us 20 years to roll out EMVchip cards in the US, you know?
Yeah, I have to.
How long do we talk about thatfor?
Forever.
But it's a great example of likeit's super innovative, great
technology, but it takes foreverto roll out.
And so, you know, there's thiskind of view of like payments is
super innovative, fast changing,which is true.
There's always lots ofheadlines.
But for it to actually make itout completely to the market, a
(13:32):
new technology to make its wayout to the market, really does
take quite a while.
That's what I mean by it's thefastest moving oil tanker you've
ever seen.
When you're running a companylike Spreebly, that's an
innovator in the space.
You have to keep up with all thechanges.
You know, we just talked aboutthe two new protocols from
OpenAI and Google and all that.
But how long does it take forthe enterprise to adopt it?
That might take a while.
And so balancing the innovation,being a software innovator with
(13:54):
being a successful, profitablecompany, that you've got to be a
little bit realistic about howfast the enterprise is going to
adopt some great new technology,not that it's bad, is one of the
interesting things for Spoodley.
Great example.
You know, we just talked aboutagents and agents being the new
front end of commerce.
Merchants, e-commerce teams havebuilt, spent lots of money
building really powerful,optimized front ends.
You know, if you go toMacy's.com, that's an e-commerce
(14:16):
engine for Macy's.
The front end is gonna go to,and I'm a Gemini user, less of a
ChatGPT user, like it's going toGemini and asking for something.
Hey, maybe Macy's has that.
That's the new front end.
And that's some of the truedisruption we're gonna see in
the space, where the front endof commerce is now the LLM
interface, and we as theinfrastructure providers have to
(14:37):
feed those versus call it themerchant's native, native
website.
SPEAKER_02 (14:42):
So besides AI and agentic commerce, agentic
payments, however you want tophrase it, the other big one
that that I often hear about arestable coins.
So just curious your thoughts onthat.
SPEAKER_01 (14:52):
I think crypto is an amazing technology, but I also
think it's a technology that hasnot reached wide adoption from a
payments, e-commerce transactionperspective.
And again, it's from anengineering technology
perspective, it is actuallyreally, really cool stuff.
But you don't really see a tonof adoption from the consumer
market.
The credit card is still king.
Now, APMs and LPMs are areactually growing massively, even
(15:16):
here in the US.
But crypto is a distant fifth orsixth or seventh.
It's not even third or fourth.
And so I think there's a lot ofreally exciting hype, and
there's a lot of great stuffthat's happening in the space,
don't get me wrong.
But it is one of those topics,and maybe it's going to be like
EMV, where in 20 years it'sactually the number one, but
it's going to take another 10,15 years.
(15:37):
I think that's the unfortunatetruth for that pro for that
technology.
SPEAKER_02 (15:41):
Okay.
A couple of final questions.
So if you could go back and giveyourself advice at the start of
your career, what would that be?
SPEAKER_01 (15:50):
I would say it's believe in your convictions and
stick with your convictions.
When you're young and you'restarting and you're learning,
you're really just learning andyou're in it to learn and try
new things and do new things andfail and pick yourself up and
try again.
But sometimes you're right andyou let somebody else lead you
down the wrong road.
(16:10):
And when you're young and youhad don't have a ton of
experience, that's always that'salways the balance of like when
do I stick with what I think isright versus, hey, like I got my
whole life ahead of me, I'mgonna try something different.
And if it fails, it fails.
You know, and so that balance issomething that as you get older
and more experienced, you getbetter at, right?
And so understanding thatbalance and having advice to
myself, you know, Peter 15 yearsago, would definitely be
(16:32):
something I would focus on.
And I would say sometimes it'strust your gut.
That's the other thing, is is asa leader, you often just kind of
know something implicitly.
You don't know why, but you do.
And sometimes it's it's theright thing to just trust that
intuition.
SPEAKER_02 (16:46):
Okay, I love that answer.
So what's the one thing thatpayments leaders that are
listening to this show today,what should they be thinking
about right now?
SPEAKER_01 (16:55):
And I'll skip over Agenda Commerce because we've
we've beat we flogged that one.
Okay.
Because that is the number one.
Also, as just somebody who lovesinnovation and technology, I
think it's just so cool what'shappening.
But I would say it's don't getwrapped up too much in the hype
and remember that it took 20years to roll out EMV.
(17:16):
And it's great innovation isreally important.
And I believe in software.
If you're not innovating, you'redead, simply put.
It's just a question of when.
And in payments, it's thefastest moving oil tanker you
ever saw.
And sometimes change takeslonger than you think.
SPEAKER_02 (17:29):
Okay, so anything that you want to leave the
audience related to Spreadly,what would you want them to
remember from this podcast aboutthe company?
SPEAKER_01 (17:36):
Spreadly is always innovating.
We are at the very beginning ofthis wave of mass adoption of
this idea that best of breed isno longer complicated to
implement.
It's about abstracting the way,abstracting away the complexity
of operating in multiple regionsacross multiple maybe business
lines in the same region, maybea medium risk and a low-risk
(17:58):
business.
And all of these things now canbe had from a single provider.
And we are the go-to brand, orwe are the leader for companies
that are looking to build theirrevenue or grow their revenue
globally.
That growth and that time tomarket is what we are great at.
SPEAKER_02 (18:19):
Okay, well, I think that's a great way to wrap up
the show.
So, Peter, thank you so much forbeing here today.
I know your time is veryvaluable, so I really appreciate
the time and for you being onthe podcast today.
Awesome.
Well, thanks for having me,Greg.
It was a good time.
And to all you listeners outthere, I thank you for your time
as well.
And until the next story.
SPEAKER_00 (18:36):
Thank you for joining us this week on the
Leaders in Payments Podcast.
Make sure you visit our websiteat leadersinpayments.com, where
you can subscribe to the showand where you'll find our show
notes.
If you enjoyed listening, pleaseshare on your social channels as
well.
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