1. Could you tell me a bit about yourself and what is your role as a senior director of APAC and MENA region in Checkout.com?

I am a finance professional, and have over 20 years of experience. I’ve worked in the Silicon Valley in the U.S. for the last 10 years. I’ve been in Singapore, so I’ve worked across diverse industries in FinTech: the big four accounting firms, PWC, MediaTech, ConsumerTech, in startups and in Fortune 500s. Currently, I am at Checkout.com as their regional controller, so I manage the finance and accounting operations for the APAC and MENA region.

2. For how long have you been managing these regions? 

I have been with Checkout for almost 20 months now, and I’m responsible for, yeah, like I said, finance operations, accounting, audits for both these regions and all the legal entities that are in these regions.

3. What do you see as some of the main challenges and opportunities for Checkout.com in the diverse markets of APAC and MENA that you mentioned?

I would say both APAC, that’s Asia Pacific, and MENA, that’s Middle East and Africa, these are cluster countries, right? They have a lot of small countries, particularly Southeast Asia, and then in MENA, you have all the Gulf countries. They’re very diverse in nature, meaning it’s a very heterogeneous region. And so while it’s very exciting to be in this region to operate as a payment service provider, there are endless opportunities, right? You have countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore, and similarly in the MENA region, you have UAE, you have Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and so on. Each country is very, very different from the other, and that’s why I say that it’s a very heterogeneous market. So the opportunity is endless because you get to enter into those markets and then establish yourself as a payment service provider. Having said that, you also have a lot of local players in each of these markets, which creates a lot of opportunity. It also creates a lot of competition, and hence the challenge to stay ahead of the competition.

4. Regarding Checkout.com, what governance or what corporate practices does a company have in place to ensure transparency or accountability given your field as finance and ethics, working finance and ethics? 

Yeah, that’s a good question. So I can answer that on multiple fronts. What are the internal governance practices that the company operates under, and what are some of the external ones? So being a payment service provider, we are almost acting like a bank, right? We are holding consumer money and it’s a highly regulated market, so in each jurisdiction, in each country that we operate, we have regulators. So for example, in Singapore, we have the Monetary Authority of Singapore that lays down certain rules and regulations in which we have to be compliant, and we have to operate within those rules and regulations. So each country that we operate in, we will have a MAS, a Monetary Authority of Singapore, equivalent in that region. So that’s the governance that they kind of impose on us, and then of course the company needs to follow that framework. This is the external governance. In the internal governance we are a scale-up, we are a startup that’s been funded by investors, so there’s regular board meetings that happen every quarter with the board, and certain metrics are presented to the board on how the company is performing, what are big investment decisions that the company intends to make in the next foreseeable future. So that’s some of the reporting that we do to the government, to the board. We also have functions like my function, for example, financial control, where we are constantly dealing with external auditors, statutory auditors who come every year, audit our books of records, and make sure we are compliant with the accounting practices. We also have an internal audit function, which is a team of experts who will randomly select functions within the organization and go and audit them, making sure that they have controls in place, they have proper processes, standard operating manuals under which they operate. So there’s a lot of ways that the company, Checkout.com particularly, has, built a compliance governance framework, and that’s how they ensure that there’s transparency, accountability, and ethical conduct.

5. Being a fintech startup, do you believe that the company’s leadership places higher priorities on generating immediate monetary revenue over sustainable and responsible business practices?

I think the company tries to strike a balance, while profitability is always at the front and center of what we do, because we are a for-profit organization, we obviously want to do business, which makes us money, and makes us makes money for our investors, our shareholders. At the same time, it’s a very environmentally conscious organization. We want to make sure that we leave behind a footprint that’s eventually a positive legacy. And so the company, they’re always striving to strike the right balance between the right level of profitability versus building a sustainable, ethical business.

6. Could you mention some of the ways that the Checkout.com team communicates its ESG performance, specifically the finance team, to its stakeholders?

I can answer this more broadly. Checkout.com has been thinking hard about a pathway to sustainability, right, and a pathway that’s both ambitious as well as scalable. It’s clear that the world needs to reach net zero as quickly as possible. So Checkout.com has been partnering with a lot of external consultants, and they are trying to kind of calculate their carbon footprint across the globe. They are trying to measure their emissions, both direct emissions and indirect emissions. So, the amount of electricity we have, offices in about 50 different countries in the world. And we have people in these offices, there’s obviously going to be consumption of electricity, laptops, the buildings have lights and fixtures and all of that. So, we are trying to cut down on our consumption, especially with the COVID era that we’ve just passed, we were encouraging people to work from home. And so, we had to reduce our office usage. So, there’s been a lot of effort on the indirect emissions, meaning just measuring the electricity that we use. Now that we are mostly back in the office, people have started traveling to different offices. So, obviously, a lot of flight travel has increased. But companies, again, being very environmentally conscious, are trying to restrict travel only where it’s necessary. We’re also managing or monitoring the servers in the cloud that we are consuming. Being in an online payments business, which is a tech company, there’s obviously a heavy reliance on cloud-based servers. So, the company is definitely trying to measure and report to the board all these metrics that measure our electricity consumption, travel consumption, and then cloud service.

7. Do you think that some of the aforementioned practices that you just mentioned are instituted in other regions in the world beyond Singapore?

Within Checkout.com? Yeah, so these, the initiatives that I mentioned, these are global initiatives across all the jurisdictions of the countries in which Checkout.com operates. We have a global team that is measuring the impact in all these countries. Now, having worked in PayPal and other big companies, how do you see the prioritization and integration of ESG factors differing between FinTech startups and already established industry leaders, especially in the specific regions you’ve worked in? So I think the clear distinction is the maturity of the organization, right? So for the likes of PayPal and the Fortune 500s, naturally they have deeper pockets. They have established themselves. There is a market for their product. And these are profitable companies. So naturally they have bigger budgets that they can spend on these very important initiatives. And they are, I’m sure they’re doing the necessary reporting. They’re engaging with the right stakeholders and regulators, and they’re trying to pave the path for all the other newcomers in the FinTech industry. So these are the torchbearers for establishing the ESG practices when it comes to the FinTech industry. So now coming to Checkout.com, we are a scale-up. We are a 2000-person company. We are not a publicly listed company. So naturally, our budgets will then vary in accordance with our size. Having said that, as I earlier mentioned, some of the wonderful initiatives that the company is undertaking. So that just kind of demonstrates that the company is absolutely thinking about these very important initiatives, ESG, CSR. It’s one of their top priorities and it’s on their mind. And they are investing proportionately to the size of the organization.