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A “sleepy” 80-person, Columbus, Ohio-based payments company just received a $60 million jolt, to strip out its old management team for a new, Chicago-based one and to set up operations to Chicago.
The company, international payment platform 2Checkout, has actually been around since the 2000s. But Chicago Growth Partners and Trident Capital recently stepped in to bring big-name Chicago entrepreneurs on board like ZestFinance co-founder Shawn Budde (now 2Checkout’s CEO), former Braintree SVP Tracey Weinberg (now 2Checkout’s CMO) and Groupon Payments alum Sean Harper (now 2Checkout’s CPO).
Together, the three execs will start up 2Checkout’s Chicago office which will serve as the company’s gateway to international talent and customers (Columbus wasn’t completely cutting it).
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But why exactly is this company of interest to Harper, Weinberg and Budde? Well, first of all it’s already got scale: over 50,000 merchants in over 200 countries currently use it (that means 2Checkout is fluent in 15 languages and 26 currencies). Second of all, it has an interesting take on payments because it allows merchants to accept online payments from anyone no matter where they are in the world.
“The scoop on 2Checkout is that it is kind of a sleepy company that has stumbled into a super hot space,” Harper, the Chicagoan who created business payments processor FeeFighters and quickly sold it to Groupon in 2012, said. “But 2Checkout can’t really afford to be sleepy: it will get crushed and will miss the chance to be part of a much bigger opportunity in payments.”
2Checkout is especially interesting to Harper because it’s a similar product to FeeFighters, but not a competitive one (as FeeFighters focused on its own POS and on domestic transactions). 2Checkout, on the other hand, focuses on online merchants and on transactions outside the US like in countries such as Argentina and Pakistan.
“What’s exciting for me is I get to extend the FeeFighters playbook to make things transparent and easy-to-use outside the US,” Harper said.
Because 2Checkout’s product is already pretty scalable, Harper’s main focus as CPO will be “making the product easy-to-use, really smooth and really, really reliable,” Harper said. His immediate goals are to make the platform easier to sign up for and easier for the merchant to implement by improving the API and then to increase the number of payment methods accepted by 2Checkout (currently there are 8 ways to pay). To do that though, Harper needs some talent on his Chicago-based team and he said he is hiring as many qualified developers as he can find.
Heading up a new product team isn’t a brand new challenge for Harper: he started FeeFighters while still at the University of Chicago and, after he sold it to Groupon, he ran Groupon’s Breadcrumb Payments team. But a new venture in the payment world is always an exciting challenge, no matter if the company started slowly or not:
“I’m interested in continuing to make things easier in payments,” Harper said. “There is so much innovation going on and these alternate payment methods are going to have a big impact. There are going to be many, many more ways to pay. Things that used to be secret or hard-to-access (payments is a good example of that)...that’s getting totally blown up. Tech companies are totally democratizing the knowledge.”
