Enjoying the podcast? Don’t miss out on future episodes! Please hit that subscribe button on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform to stay updated with our latest content. Thank you for your support!
In this episode, we talk with Paulette Rowe, CEO of Stax, a payments technology company that’s making waves in the embedded payments space by taking a fundamentally different approach than many competitors. Rather than simply reselling services from payment processing giants, Stax has built and acquired the technology to own their entire stack, from gateway to clearing and settlement. This strategic decision allows them to move faster, provide better data, and offer more flexibility to their clients, particularly in the vertical SaaS and ISV market where they are seeing rapid growth.
Paulette, who brings a unique perspective from her extensive payments experience across both the UK and US markets, discusses how Stax differentiates itself in the competitive embedded payments landscape, their innovative Stax Connect Plus offering that helps ISVs dramatically improve payment attachment rates, and how AI is already transforming their customer support operations. The conversation also explores the future of payments innovation, including the potential for agentic AI in e-commerce and Stax’s international expansion plans.
In this podcast you will learn:
- Paulette’s career arc and the journey to the CEO job at Stax.
- How the US payments landscape differs from the UK and Europe.
- The comprehensive payments solutions provided by Stax.
- How they work with ISVs (independent software providers).
- The two acquisitions they have made in the past two years.
- Why they developed Stax Connect Plus.
- How Stax differentiates itself in the ISV embedded payments market.
- How they compete with the Stripes and Squares of the world.
- What markets Stax operates in today.
- Paulette’s thoughts on the new payments rails being developed.
- How they have been using AI internally and then, Benji for customer support.
- How they are preparing for Agentic AI for e-commerce.
- The biggest opportunities in the future for Stax.
Read a transcription of our conversation below.
FINTECH ONE-ON-ONE PODCAST NO. 544 – PAULETTE ROWE
Paulette Rowe: There are a number of the bigger players out there who’ve been successful because their technology is easy to integrate with. Well, guess what? So is ours. But once you’ve integrated the technology, that’s not enough. That’s not what’s going to make you successful at payments. That just means you’ve got a solution. And we see so many ISVs where their payment attachment rate is below 30%, below 20%. And yet, as you’ve said, those companies that have been out there doing this successfully, they’re getting 60, 70, 80 % attachment. So the fact that we can help them drive up their payment attachment, that’s a huge differentiator for us.
Peter Renton: This is the Fintech One-on-One Podcast, the show for fintech enthusiasts looking to better understand the leaders shaping fintech and banking today. My name is Peter Renton, and since 2013, I’ve been conducting in-depth interviews with fintech founders and banking executives. Today on the show, I am delighted to welcome Paulette Rowe, the CEO of Stax, a payments technology company focused on serving small businesses as well as the Vertical SaaS/ISV space with embedded payments. As you’ll be able to tell, Paulette is English and has spent a lot of time working in payments in both the UK and the US. So she shares her perspectives on the differences between the two countries. Of course, we dive into what makes Stax different, the opportunity of Vertical SaaS, the importance of owning the entire tech stack, how they’re implementing AI, their future plans for international expansion, and much more. Now let’s get on with the show.
Welcome to the podcast, Paulette.
Paulette: Very happy to be here, Peter. Thank you.
Peter: My pleasure. Let’s kick it off by giving the listeners a little bit of background about yourself. You’ve had an interesting career to date with some of the biggest names in finance. Maybe you could just hit on some of the high points of your career to date.
Paulette: Kind of you to say I’ve had an interesting career, certainly had a lot of fun over the years; more years than I’d like to, I tend to admit to.
Peter: Same.
Paulette: Coming out of business school, I went straight into financial services as part of GE, General Electric, which at the time was still a very large, complex global business. And really got the bug for financial services there. Had the opportunity after GE to work in retail banking. I was with GE working in the US, I should have said, mostly, but working globally for them. Went back to the UK and went into retail banking, working at a company called the Royal Bank of Scotland, NatWest as it’s branded now. But my big break into payments proper as opposed to retail banking and consumer finance came in 2012 when I joined Barclays and ran the processing business, the merchant acquiring business at Barclays. And haven’t looked back since then, have really enjoyed being part of this crazy world of payments and all of the changes that we’ve seen since. So, after Barclays, I went to Facebook, which is now obviously rebranded Meta. And after that, joined a company called Paysafe, again, still in the payments world, before taking on this current role as CEO of Stax. So as you said, it’s been varied: large, small, private equity, public company. But yeah, I’ve been very, very lucky with my choices.
Peter: It sounds like you spent a good chunk of your career in London; you just said before we hit record that you’re in Atlanta, Georgia. So what brought you back to this country? Was it this particular job or something else?
Paulette: It was this job, and yeah, I’ve spent a lot of time in the US. You’re right, I’ve lived in the US before, but in many of my career choices, I’ve had the opportunity to either sort of have US-based teams or travel to the US to meet with customers, et cetera. And I think apart from Covid, I’ve spent every single year since business school, at least some point in the year, in the US. So I love coming here, I love working here. And the opportunity to come back and be CEO of Stax and live in the US again full-time was very, very compelling. But mostly because of Stax actually, its reputation as a disruptor, very, very cool software, beautifully designed software, that had allowed it to grow extremely quickly in the SMB market. But then the pivot into the ISV space, which was part of my role when I was at Paysafe. I was the divisional CEO for integrated solutions and e-commerce, and really felt that there is so much opportunity in that ISV space. So yeah, I’ve got very excited about the vision for the company and where I wanted to take the company, too, which hopefully we’ll get a chance to talk about.
Peter: Most definitely, we will delve into all of that here in just a little bit. But before we do, I want to take a step back. I mean, you’ve got an interesting perspective because you have a lot of experience in the UK and Europe, where you’ve had faster payments in the UK, seems like forever, certainly for a long time.
Paulette: Send me a check thing that still happens in the US?
Peter: It’s kind of funny, isn’t it? Because the US was, you know, is cutting edge in so many ways, but yet we have not really mastered faster payments.
Paulette: Yes.
Peter: We’re getting there, and people still do checks. Beside that, what, when you’re looking at the two regions, what is it that you would say are some of the differences, you know, from the US payments landscape to that in the UK and Europe?
Paulette: Yeah, I think there’s maybe two things worth calling out. First of all is the whole, well, size. Size matters. And in the US, size has not always been a benefit because it’s so fragmented. So whereas in the UK and even in Europe, you can get a relatively small number of players together in the financial services/banking space, and they can sort of agree, hey, as they did in the UK. We want to do contactless. We want to be able to sort of tap and go, this is going to be beneficial. And you could get like four or five banks in a room, and you’ve got most of the market covered. That opportunity isn’t here in the U.S., and therefore, the cost of changing technology, getting alignment, makes it much more difficult to adopt certain types of innovation. And equally, the regulatory landscape, which interestingly seems to sort of be reverting back to more state-by-state, which the whole European Union experiment was all about, let’s try and get a single approach to the market. So I think those sort of structural elements have made certain types of the payments innovation less easy to adopt or to drive in the US market. But then the other thing is that in Europe, because we don’t have the same scale, there have been maybe smaller, slightly smaller companies. Perhaps again, a little bit more innovation. There’s been less of this sort of overall sort of consolidation; companies buying each other and becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. And whilst again, in some ways that should be good for the market because hopefully those companies become more efficient. The reality is that with payments, you end up sitting on lots of fragmented legacy technology, which is difficult to integrate, which then becomes difficult to offer, to drive again innovation, and to offer the experience that consumers and merchants want. I think those are the two things that I see that have been different in the US market. As you say, it’s changing very, very quickly, but that’s, I think, a lot of what’s made Europe and Asia perhaps faster at adopting some of this new tech.
Peter: Yeah, yeah, those are good points. That makes sense. So let’s dive into Stax. Should I think about Stax as really like two different offerings? One that’s going, you do payment solutions directly to businesses, and then you have your vertical kind of vertical SaaS or ISV type businesses. Is that sort of how we should think about it? Or maybe you can just give us a bit more color on Stax.
Paulette: Yeah, we have a very comprehensive solution, and there’s the payment processing, but we also do subscription billing. We offer software that provides that sort of invoicing and billing solution. And we also do surcharging, compliance surcharging. So we have some other product staples that we offer to our customers. But in terms of our channel approach, yeah, we go direct to small businesses because that’s where we started. We’ve got a very, very flexible solution. It is an embedded software solution in its own right. You can do a lot of things, like billing and invoicing, directly from our payment software. But then we also offer embedded solutions for SaaS companies, for ISVs who want to be able to offer a one-stop shop to their merchants, to their customers, and include payments within that. And we think it’s important to have both. Certainly, I see the growth in the embedded payments on the SaaS side. That’s been incredible for us and will continue to be the highest growth part of our business. But at the same time, whilst the number of SMBs, I think it’s like 60% of SMBs, are now using vertically based enterprise software. The opportunity for them to just take payments and simplify their experiences is huge. At the same time, there will always be SMBs who want to have a direct relationship with their payment provider. So, having both solutions, I think, works extremely well for us.
Peter: So, when you’re working with the ISVs, are you providing your full suite of products that you also provide directly to small businesses, or are you really focusing on the payments processing? What are you doing through the ISV channel?
Paulette: We often, so forgive me, we talk a lot internally about StaxPay and StaxConnect, StaxPay being our software for our direct channel. But the reality is it’s really one solution and it’s all about where you sit, if you like, in the hierarchy. So, if you’re an ISV and you’re providing payments to merchants who are buying your software, we give you the software solution, we happen to brand StaxConnect, but that gives you full transparency in terms of what’s happening, how many merchants have applications with us. You can see all of the reporting. You can see where all the settlements are. So it’s like a little control center that the SaaS company can use. And it also allows them to completely white label, if they choose to, the experience. What we actually find, though, is that most of our ISV clients choose to take a hybrid. There’s some elements they white label and some elements where they use the Stax branding. But to your point, they can also, if they want to, use Stax, all of the Stax tools, they can use everything that we offer directly to our small business customers as well. So if they’re more sophisticated, they may just want to connect with us with APIs and white label everything and make it their own end-to-end experience or they can use all of our tools, and again, they can white label those if they want to, but not have to create any of that payments experience for themselves. So yeah, a lot of flexibility in terms of ISVs and we like to say we meet the ISV wherever they are on the payments journey. That’s very important to us. So, if you’re super sophisticated, we’ve got you. If you need a bit more handholding, we can do that too.
Peter: So did Stax entering this new channel, this new way of providing your software, did this predate your arrival, or is this something that you sort of saw and went with?
Paulette: Yeah, so we moved into the sort of ISV space properly around sort of 2019, 2020. So it’s still sort of early in our 10-year history, but we’ve seen incredible growth. But to your point, having had the opportunity to talk to GSV, our investors about joining Stax. I was incredibly excited by the full potential of our ISV offering and how we can take that further. And one of the things, and I kind of alluded to this is, in the US there are a lot of players where they’re providing, they’re reselling basically, the payment service of one of the, I like to call them the super tankers. So they’re reselling, they might sort of put some software in front of it. But essentially, when you lift the lid and you look at what’s really powering their payments, they’re using one of the big guys. So for us at Stax, the challenge and the excitement have been, what if we turned all of the boxes purple, and the Stax branding is purple. So what we wanted to do was to own our own technology end to end, to really control our own destiny, and in so doing, allow our customers and merchants to come to us because we can move faster, we can provide them with better data, better product development, because we’ve got all of the elements in-house. So that was the part of the story, yes, let’s grow the ISV segment. But the part of the story I was particularly excited about is becoming a payments technology and processing company, as opposed to remaining in that reseller space where Stax started 10 years ago.
Peter: Right, right. And it sounds like, when I was doing a bit of research for this interview, it sounds like you’ve done some acquisitions in the past two or three years that have really helped you get into the situation you just described, right? Was that sort of just trying to shortcut the time rather than trying to build all this yourself?
Paulette: Yes, so you can never be certain that you’re going to find the right opportunities, but we continued to scan the market. And the two acquisitions that really stand out are the APPS acquisition in 2023, which has provided us with a superb clearing and settlement platform, which is live. We’ve integrated into our ecosystem, and we’re just cutting over some of our ISV clients to that platform. So that’s been really exciting. And then in 2024, we acquired a company called BlockChyp. And BlockChyp was also a provider in the ISV space, but had built their own gateway. And for the payment geeks listening, you’ll know that getting a robust card present gateway that isn’t a gazillion years old is not easy. So when the opportunity to acquire a BlockChyp came up, we saw that as another opportunity to own another critical piece of the technology ourselves. So it’s not that we have to own everything, but those fundamental pieces from the software to the gateway to the clearing and settlement, those are the pieces that we think make a fundamental difference. And then, as I mentioned, we have other acquisitions that we’ve done that have brought in the surcharging and the subscription billing pieces as well, just to sort of complete our offering there.
Peter: Right, right. Okay, so I want to dive into Stax Connect, your ISV platform, and because I also was reading about you now have Stax Connect Plus. So maybe you can explain the difference between those products and what you’re trying to achieve here.
Paulette: And I’m smiling because we had a conversation around, should we brand this? And my fabulous marketing team came up with Stax Connect Plus. And I love the name because it sort of does what it says on the tin. So what Stax Connect Plus does is to say, look, we’re not just here to provide you with great technology. That matters a huge amount. And we continue, as you’ve heard, to invest in not only providing great software, but making sure that we own and are responsible for all parts of the technology delivery. But what Stax Connect Plus does is to say, we understand that the most important KPI is actually how much revenue you’re generating from the payments that we’re embedding in your software. And in order to do that, not every ISV has the tools, the time, or indeed the opportunity to drive it as hard as we can on their behalf. So Stax Connect Plus provides basically the sales, it provides some of the customer supporters as needed, and activation to really help our customers, the ISV platforms, drive payments. So it can be as simple as a little bit of just helping them with their go-to-market strategies, their pricing strategies, all the way through to, we will do the sale on your behalf. And we’ve seen some really, really exciting results, especially from our early adopters who’ve been working with us for a while, a doubling of revenue from the new mids that we’ve been able to land on their behalf, and big increases, or a 36% increase in the mids that we’re opening. So we’re not just selling more, we’re selling more, getting them active faster, and they’re generating each of these mids is generating more revenue. And if you want us to help with some of the tier one customer service, we can help with that too. So yeah, we have some partners, ISV partners, who’ve been with Stax since the get-go, who’ve been running their own, they’ve had their own teams cross-selling payments, who’ve now made the decision to outsource that to us because they’ve seen the great results that we’re getting.
Peter: Interesting. That’s really interesting. I mean, one of the great things about this country is that, like you say, it’s big. And there are so many, like every industry, it seems, today has its own vertical SaaS companies, the ISVs that are providing specialist software just for this particular industry. You know, embedded payments, a competitive space, it’s not a new idea. Some people have been, you know, doing payments as a vertical for revenue for many years now. How are you differentiating yourself in this market? I wouldn’t say it’s crowded, but it’s certainly not empty.
Paulette: It’s not empty, you’re absolutely right. But at the same time, and you touched on this, the appetite for verticalized software just seems to be growing. Yeah, we get customers emerging in verticals that we had never thought of. So we focus mostly on field services/home care, specialized healthcare, and professional services. We do support other verticals as well, but we’ve seen success particularly in those areas. And if you take field services, that can go from the more classic HVAC sellers where we have customers who have specialist software in that space, right the way through to sort of doggy daycare. Who knew you needed specialist software for doggy daycare?
Peter: Big business these days.
Paulette: I live in Atlanta, and people love their dogs. I thought people loved their dogs in the UK, but Atlanta is next level. And I love dogs too. So yeah, so first of all, I think the opportunity for us is to not provide, you know, we’ve got great horizontal tools, but how do we make sure we understand the nuances of the different verticals that we’re supporting so that we can really help the ISVs who’ve taken the time to understand their market and go after their particular niche. How do we actually help them reinforce that they understand their market like no other player? And that’s where owning more of the technology helps us to do that, because we’re not just tinkering at the front, we can actually make sure that everything is lined up end to end. The other thing is really that sense of control. So we can white label, we can provide you with the data. So by owning the experience end-to-end by being a processor as well as a great provider of payment software, we think we could differentiate that way. And we do differentiate that way. And the last thing is the Stax Connect Plus. There are a number of bigger players out there who’ve been successful because their technology is easy to integrate with. Well, guess what? So is ours. But once you’ve integrated the technology, that’s not enough. That’s not what’s going to make you successful at payments. That just means you’ve got a solution. And we see so many ISVs where their payment attachment rate is below 30%, below 20%. And yet, as you’ve said, those companies that have been out there doing this successfully, they’re getting 60, 70, 80% attachment. So the fact that we can help them drive up their payment attachment, that’s a huge differentiator for us. So whether it’s a company that is looking to do payments, embedded payments for the first time, or as I said, some of our partners have been doing this for a while with some success, but now realize that we can take them to the next level. That is very, very key. And just being able to talk to someone, some of the larger players in the space, as I said, great technology, but if you have a question, if you need a little bit more handholding, you’re not going to really get that level of support. So that’s where we are people as well as technology.
Peter: Okay, so you’ve been referencing these larger players, you know, let’s just say Stripe, Square, for example, these are companies that are, they’re still, they’re fintech companies, but in many ways they are big incumbents with, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of people. And as you say, are sometimes not as easy to get a hold of a human. But when I look at those kinds of companies, they have the scale and the distribution where, you know, they have name recognition, brand recognition. So when you’re going and competing head-to-head with them, you talked about a little bit just in the last question, but I’d like to tease it out a bit more. If you’re competing head-to-head with Stripe or Square, what do you tell the ISV that they can go with Stax and not worry that they’re not going with the big guys?
Paulette: Yeah, I think, as you said, I sort of touched on some of it. Of course, the technology really matters. And so we invest in our technology, in the back-end services that we are developing, as well as our software. So, if the technology isn’t strong, you’re not going to win the argument. So, the flexibility of our solution is, as well as the fact that we have the APIs, we’re cloud-based, all of the tick, tick, tick things that a partner would want to be reassured about, we spend a lot of money on security, etc. All of those things are there. But what we really can sell as part of our solution is that flexibility, particularly the fact that it can be white labeled, none of it, all of it, or different parts of it. And then as we get into particular verticals, again, if you’re going with a larger player that doesn’t necessarily have that vertical focus, we can show whether it’s from our underwriting rules right the way through to the way in which we do reporting and even the way we do some of our white labeling, that we’ve thought about how we can make it more relevant to that ISV’s particular vertical. So, the verticals that I’ve talked about, field services, specialist healthcare, and professional services, have been a really big thing. A quick example in the legal space is that many legal firms need to keep client money separate from their operating accounts. So they’ve got trust accounts and operating accounts. Well, that’s a solution that we’ve built for those legal entities or legal companies so that when they’re using the software of the ISVs that we work with, they know that they can trust that we can keep those settlements separate. So those are the things on the technology side.
And then I think it does come back to the strong combination of technology and people. So, technical excellence, tick, but also the growth mindset. One of our most important values is driving customer success. That’s what we talk about all the time as a company. So the relationship really starts once they’ve integrated with us, because what we’re looking at is how much their payments are growing, and how we help our clients make more revenue from payments. So that’s where I think, if particularly for high-growth ISVs, and actually, just to touch on that, just a quick thought. The market for SaaS has become harder. So it used to be that SaaS companies were growing 30-odd percent. That we’ve seen, as you’ve said, that the market, whilst it’s becoming more verticalized, is getting harder and harder to find that growth. So, using embedded payments as a way of helping to drive revenue growth is more important than ever. And so why not partner with someone who isn’t just going to get you integrated and then leave you alone, but be there as a trusted partner, meeting you where you are in your payments journey to make sure you get the best result you possibly can.
Peter: Yeah, now I think embedded payments, if you’re a vertical SaaS company, unless you’ve got some kind of unique situation that it doesn’t lend itself to this, you’ve got to have a payments revenue coming in. It just feels like it’s mandatory these days. But anyway, I want to move on. Actually, are you just focused on the US, or do you extend into other countries?
Paulette: Yes, we have the US and Canada.
Peter: Okay.
Paulette: And as you can imagine, coming from an international place, we’re very excited to take Stax internationally as well. So that’s a huge opportunity for us, as our ISVs grow, we want to follow those partnerships into other markets. But right now, we’re North America-focused.
Peter: So I’m curious about alternative payments rails because I imagine you’re somewhat agnostic to what type of payment is processed. And you see, we saw the news, Stripe making a lot of inroads into stablecoins. They made a major acquisition, and they’re very global, obviously. And particularly in some emerging markets, stablecoins are very, very commonplace. So with that in mind, you’re focused on North America. I’m still curious about what you’re looking at when it comes to some of these emerging technologies in payments and new payments rails completely that are being developed. What’s your thinking there?
Paulette: Yeah, very keen to move fast in all of these areas. So, as you mentioned, coming from a European perspective, payouts, faster payments, all of these things are on our roadmap. It’s a question of making sure that we sequence these things to the benefit of our customers. So we will be completing our Stax processing development this year, which then leaves us lots of capacity to roll out plenty of new things in 2026. We process ACH today, as well as card payments, so we’re excited to look at things like real-time settlement, faster payments, etc., the equivalent in the US. But where we have decided that we simply can’t wait and need to be moving very, very quickly, and have seen immediate successes adopting some of these AI tools. So I feel it’s almost obligatory to talk about AI.
Peter: Yeah that was going be my next question so go for it.
Paulette: So we have been using AI within our engineering teams for help with coding, but also with testing, testing faster, testing more completely, because you can use AI to drive additional scenarios and edge cases. But our favorite AI helper today is called Benji. And for those who may know a little bit about Stax history, Benji used to be the mascot of Stax when Stax was called Fatt Merchant before we rebranded. And Benji has joined our customer support team and is dealing with customer support tickets. And Benji is doing a fabulous job and has managed to take 57% of tickets that would normally go to our customer support agents and deal with those. It’s getting five-star reviews. Our customer support people get five-star reviews, too. They were very, very keen to make sure that Benji wasn’t screwing things up for them. That’s been exciting because it allows our customer support team, our customer success team to really focus on more complex cases, and allow customers to get answers extremely fast. So yeah, we’re excited about how to continue to use AI across the business.
Peter: Go Benji. Okay. Actually, just follow up on that, though. Any of your vertical SaaS clients, is anybody talking about like AI, agentic AI for e-commerce, doing, you know, talking about using it as a payments tool, or are we still not quite there yet?
Paulette: I think everyone is because the technology is moving so quickly. I always like to reference our CTO, Mark Sundt, who surprised me when he said that his mother had written her thesis back in the day when she was at university on AI, and that was, I don’t know, probably sort of 60 years ago. So it’s been around for a super long time, of course, but now, it feels like every couple of weeks, what you can do with these tools is just transforming, transformational. So yes, we’re having those conversations. In fact, I just came off a call with one of the card brands where we were talking about being able to make purchases within the AI space. So, as people sort of ask questions and are using the AI tools, we want to be able to facilitate a purchase then and there, rather than you having to come out, go to the website, put in your details again. It’s funny because I remember when I was in my role at Barclays, we talked about these sorts of things, but it wasn’t really, to your point, it felt like they were too far away. Now, the tools are absolutely there. I think the next, it felt for a while that maybe innovation in payments has sort of reached a pause. Well, AI is going to kick that off again. And I think some of the things that we’re talking about in terms of real-time payments, et cetera, those things will still be important. But I do think the agenda for how AI can enable frictionless payments will be something that we’ll be needing to move on very, very quickly in the next few months and years.
Peter: Yeah, for sure, for sure. There’ll be a surge of new payments innovation to enable that to happen because it’s not, it’s not a simple process.
Paulette: No.
Peter: That’s for sure.
Paulette: Yeah.
Peter: It’s gonna be quite complex. So anyway, we’ve run out of time. Just last question: what do you see when you’re looking at the future for Stax? What do you see as the biggest opportunities?
Paulette: I think for Stax, it’s first of all, really maximizing the opportunity that owning our tech and being a processor opens up for us. We’re very focused, as you’ve heard, on the opportunity in the ISV, in the embedded payment space. But the flexibility, and I’ve talked a lot about flexibility, but the flexibility, the control of our cost, the control of our data, that’s going to open up so many products, opportunities that will ultimately help our customers. We’re about to embark, I think, on a next wave of innovation for Stax that’s been enabled by the fact that we control all of the key levers within our business, and we can go fast. And that includes AI. The next thing is broadening the product offering. Where that may be a partner as well as a build. But in terms of going beyond payments, we see our ISVs looking for opportunities to become that one-stop shop and thinking about other products beyond payments. So, embedded finance is something that I think we will take a look at, and try to figure out which parts of the market we want to play in and own, and where we should partner. And then the last piece is international. Again, our motto is that we’re there to, our value is that we drive customer success. And for many of our customers, they see the opportunity to take their software into new international markets. The ISV growth internationally has not been the same as in the US. A lot of these US players have a huge opportunity overseas, and we will want to follow those customers and be their trusted partners wherever they go. Not today, but we will certainly be there over time.
Peter: Okay, we’ll have to leave it there, Paulette. That really was a fascinating conversation. I appreciate you coming on the show today.
Paulette: Well, thank you so much for your time and your great questions.
Peter: See ya. Bye-bye.
Owning the entire tech stack, I think, is going to be super important as the next revolution in payments arrives. We only just touched on it, but agentic payments is going to transform the payments landscape, particularly e-commerce, I think. It will happen gradually and then very, very quickly. And those companies that control their entire tech stack will be the ones best positioned to take advantage. So, Stax is well placed here.
Anyway, that’s it for today’s show. If you enjoy these episodes, please go ahead and subscribe, tell a friend, or leave a review. And thanks so much for listening.