Frank Keller, PayPal | commercetools Elevate 2024

Yeah, sure. I mean, we have a partnership with Commerce Tools on our payments platforms like Venmo and PayPal Complete Payments. PayPal is known for our branded checkout, the button that everybody knows. And we know that a lot of customers go through guest checkout flow, meaning they're not using our wallet or other wallets. So it's a very cumbersome process because when you check out as a guest, you have to fill in your name, your payment details, your address, phone number. When you look at the conversion stats of that... they found the right product, they put everything in the cart, they're ready to pay, now they abandon it. So it's very expensive to have abandonment at that process and no conversion. The idea of Fast Lane is to take those customers that are not willing to register and make it a one-click payment. How does that work? It basically works the first time on any merchant that participates in the Fast Lane network. They go through regular guest checkout and by the end of that guest checkout they see that they can save their information with Fast Lane by PayPal. And the next time they come to either the same merchant or a different merchant that participates in the network, they go through a guest checkout... So why is the 'by PayPal' important? There are a couple of options out there to do that, but what we've recognized is that consumers trust PayPal. They trust PayPal with their data. We've been around for a long time. We're one of the most trusted brands, actually one of the most trusted brands where people believe that they can store their information safely with us, their most critical financial information. We're not sharing that information otherwise. So when they see 'by PayPal', it's not the PayPal checkout button because they don't want to use it, but it's by PayPal, they still trust us with their data, and so people opt into this really seamless experience. That's what we've announced with Commerce Tools to do that guest checkout fast.

You're welcome. Households, women are the primary consumers, so I'm not just buying shoes for myself, you know, I'm buying for my family. And I am an expert at e-commerce experiences and I have really high expectations for those to be pleasant experiences and efficient experiences. So hearing about steps that you're taking in partnership with Commerce Tools to make those experiences better, that makes perfect sense and we all win. Customers win, vendors win, you sell more, we get the things we want in a seamless way, we all win. The reason why we're partnering with Commerce Tools is because for any business who wants to implement the product, we want to remove that burden as much as possible. The closer the partnership is with a platform like Commerce Tools, the easier it is for the merchant to innovate with the customer in mind, a customer-centric approach to creativity, making sure that it is delivering on what the customer wants and needs at where they are in their shopping journeys.

I mean, there are multiple ways. One is we have 35 million merchants out there, 400 million consumers. We get a lot of inbound. When I talk and my teams talk to our customers, new ideas come up. There are also industry trends. The idea of improving guest checkout is not a new one. Then we say, okay, how can we bring our assets to bear? We have a lot of data on the consumer in the Western world. So the idea was, if we've seen them already, they're all using guest or branded, how can we leverage that to the next thing? That's when innovation starts. But that's the idea. Now you need to really work with customers and start implementing it because you stumble across things where you're like, oh, I didn't expect that to happen. Oh, why are customers suddenly turning off here? For instance, when we did Fast Lane, we experimented with a name because one of the big things that we knew is that even non-PayPal customers trust PayPal, as I said. But if the association is too strong, they get confused. 'I'm not checking out now with PayPal or what?' And so... we worked with tools to do this every day, and we're innovating as we're launching, we're constantly refining it. It's basis point by basis point improvement because that's big dollars in the end for our customers.

I think removing friction to drive conversion. Checkout has been a little bit an afterthought, but now as I said, there's a big ROI if you have abandonment at that stage. The other thing that I'm seeing is choice has proliferated. There's so much choice, especially when you're an international retailer and you want to offer all kinds of payment methods. It looks like the NASCAR of checkout. You probably want to finance it, so monthly installments of paying four in the US, paying three in France. That's what you want to see if you buy a big-ticket item. If you buy a chewing gum, you probably don't want to finance it, right? So it's very simple, it's easy. It's purchase price that makes that choice. But you don't want to show things that are not relevant. Also, if I know you prefer to pay with a credit card and you prefer to pay with a debit card, I probably show that on top, right, or other payment methods. So I think making the checkout much smarter and show personalized for the consumer what is relevant. The trade-off of that is we don't want to scare consumers because everyone's like, how do you know that? So that's the philosophy. People trusted us with their financial information. Now into the age of data and AI, where people trust us with their data, the same promises: we're not sharing that. We have to have control and transparency: what is used and how is it used. That's the philosophy behind it. Now we got to work with customers together to figure out how it works. It's all new for us, super exciting.

Yeah, I mean, if you think about the core value, it's that we keep customers safe. That's how we started. When we started, the core problem we tried to solve was, okay, you have these online shops, now how do you pay there? Especially in a world where in the physical world people were used to... and so keeping that data secure, cyber security is a big one for us: keeping data safe, making sure there's no data breaches and so on, and sharing no non-personal information with those parties out there and still facilitating that transaction. That's what we've been doing for many years. Now Commerce has moved on, and now this new age of AI, I think requires a rethinking of this. We have a lot of debate internally about how do we transform, how do we keep customers along and still stay true to that brand promise. When we innovate around those products, there's the debate about 'I want to enable this friction-free experience' versus 'oh no, you can't do this because you cannot do it in this way.' We have the most debates internally about that. No, I'm picturing that Venn diagram: how do we find that sweet spot? It's a hard one. When you solve hard problems, you create value. Yeah, when you solve hard problems with the customer at the center of everything, that really is what makes a trusted brand. Correct.

Yeah, when Dirk and I started talking about the partnership and extended partnership, we've been partnering on our payments platform. How can the idea of an open platform in this age of AI and partner really on new innovations? That's kind of talking here to customers and partners is what I'm getting out of this. You asked me about how do we innovate? It's through these conversations.

Thanks for having me.