Luke Salinas runs strategy in North America for Adyen, which is a provider of frictionless payments across online, mobile, and in-store for global companies like Uber and Netflix. Prior to his role at one of the hottest fintech firms anywhere, he ran payments and fraud at Uber, so he has a strong merchant perspective.
Salinas, who ran payments and fraud at Uber, joins us on the Tearsheet Podcast this week to delve deeper into what today's largest merchants demand from their payments providers and unpack the trends impacting today's payments business.
Subscribe: iTunes I SoundCloud
Below are highlights, edited for clarity, from the episode.
Serving the enterprise
"Historically, our focus has been solidly on the enterprise. We process for eight of the top 10 Internet companies, like Uber and Facebook. Eventually, we'll have to move down to the mid market but for now, it's pretty much blue skies in the enterprise space. A lot of large companies are dedicated to providing the best user experience and frictionless experience they can. Accomplishing that outside of the big, established Western markets has been a challenge and that's where we come in and try to help our merchants mirror that experience in challenging markets around the world.
We're also enabling merchants to expand across the globe as quickly as possible and doing that with a feeling of safety and security. Large merchants are also trying to figure out subscriptions. How do you do subscriptions like Netflix and Spotify do in markets that don't have the same recurrent payment capabilities that the U.S. has?"
Getting omnichannel right
"Lately, we've put a big focus on our omnichannel proposition. We've been working with a a lot of really large retailers. Omnichannel is something the industry has been talking about for years. Before today, if you were a big retailer and you wanted a truly omnichannel experience for your shoppers -- things like buy online and pickup in-store, return in-store, or endless aisle -- you really had to do it yourself as a merchant.
You'd plug into a point of sale payments provider and an e-commerce payments provider and you'd have bring it all back into your own ERP and unify all the channels there. We've been working with merchants to work on a single, unified platform across all payments across all channels, so that the meat of all that unification process happens on our side, limiting how much development retailers need to do."
