FinTech TV Host: Welcome to FinTech TV. As global commerce expands, merchants face a growing dilemma: expanding across borders and new channels offers massive revenue opportunities, but managing fragmented payment methods, regional compliance, and siloed systems can stop growth in its tracks. At Money 2020, infrastructure giant Fiserv announcing the global rollout of Commerce Hub, a single platform designed to orchestrate and unify enterprise commerce worldwide. Well, joining us to discuss the future of commerce is Leah Ko, who's Chief Revenue Officer of Enterprise and Platforms at Fiserv. Well, great to have you here. Thank you so much for joining me.
Leah Ko: Thank you for having me.
FinTech TV Host: Well, first and foremost, since you're joining us on the ground at Money 2020, tell us about the announcement.
Leah Ko: We are super excited about the announcement and the, you know, the reception from our clients is overwhelmingly positive. I mean, right, in today's commerce environment, I think the payments landscape is only getting more and more complex. Uh, you mentioned earlier, there's just more, um, different markets, different regulatory regimes, different payment methods, different local requirements. Uh, our global merchants are navigating a very complex, um, even more complex, uh, by the day, um, payments landscape. Commerce Hub is meant to really provide this one global stack, right, one global gateway, one global switch, one settlement platform to really reduce that complexity for our global merchants so that they can launch, um, in different markets that much faster, uh, with, uh, merchant acquiring and also a wide range of value-added services that Commerce Hub offers.
FinTech TV Host: And we, you and I, before we went on air, were talking about Money 2020, the conference itself. And we all know that it has evolved over the years, but given the fact that you're on the ground talking to stakeholders as well as hearing about the supply, as well as the demand side when it comes to what's needed right now, what would you say are the key takeaways so far at this year's event?
Leah Ko: Uh, great question. I think, um, every year I come to Money 2020, there are always, like, hot topics, right, which, which is why this conference is so great. You can really see where, where the market is headed and what are the client demands. I think this year a few key topics. One is AI. We hear a lot about, um, AI tools, agentic commerce, and I think that's highly relevant for clients of all sizes, right? At Fiserv, we look at it from SMB front, our core platform as the commerce operating system for SMBs, we are embedding a lot of the AI intelligence and AI tools to help SMBs grow. Um, they usually, they're not really sophisticated in terms of payments, and, and they have so much to manage on a daily basis. I think our global platform, um, augmented with AI workflow tools, AI intelligence, um, and AI agents really, you know, I think are leveling the playing field for SMBs so that they can not worry about payments and, and worry about their day to day, how to grow their business. When it comes to large merchants and global merchants, that's where we talked about the Commerce Hub, where we have an agentic commerce layer, um, whereby we can enable global merchants to do, you know, payments optimization, least-cost routing, to offer them fraud, uh, intelligence, and how do we minimize the fraud? How do we really smartly route payments? Um, so those, um, they have different needs and the large merchants have different needs than small merchants, but I think the whole AI, um, tools and agentic commerce are enabling both client segments to grow.
FinTech TV Host: That's super, super exciting. And as you mentioned on the ground here at Money 2020, we've been hearing a lot about artificial intelligence as well as cross-border payments and agentic commerce. But given some of these challenges out there, it does present opportunities. And at the same time, trust has been a theme that we've also been hearing about too. So what is your perspective on that?
Leah Ko: I think that's, it's so critical, it's fundamental to our business, right? I think, you know, for small businesses, middle-market clients, merchants, enterprise clients, trust is at the core of the payments business, right? Because that's, you know, for small businesses, they're running their payroll, their, you know, receivables and everything on our platform. They have to trust that our platform is stable, is, you know, is, you know, we give them fraud tools so that they don't have to worry about, you know, payment stability or, or fraudulent activities. Same thing for the large merchants. So I think at Fiserv we have a few things that, that really cultivate that trust, sense of trust. One is our global scale. And we cover, um, you know, hundreds of markets, and Commerce Hub is already live in 47 markets, um, so we can give them that global coverage so that they, they know that they have Fiserv as the backbone of their payment processing in all the markets they operate. And by the way, recently we also announced a strategic partnership with Mastercard, right? And Mastercard's Merchant Cloud will be embedded into Commerce Hub and, and help, help us cover even more markets such as Saudi Arabia and, and select Asian markets for our global merchants. So I think that scale really, um, is enabling a lot of the, the trust and stability for our merchants. Um, second is our reach. So you think about Fiserv as a tremendous, um, you know, scale-critical infrastructure for payments. For example, in the US we, um, we basically touch almost 90-95% of the US households because of our scale in payments, also financial services, uh, we have a tremendous coverage of, of consumers and we also touch maybe 85%, above 85% of the SMBs in the US. So I think with that kind of scale, what does that mean? That means we have the intelligence with the data, right? And then, you know, all the behavioral payments information around these consumers and SMBs that enables us to have better, I would say best-in-class kind of fraud tools, fraud intelligence, uh, to really safeguard our merchants and then the payment flows. So I think all these factors, I think, contribute to, like, building that trust, continuing to build that trust with our merchant base.
FinTech TV Host: And that is so integral when we're talking about enterprises, and you also weighed in on jurisdiction, and we all know that when you're in so many markets in so many regions around the globe, the regulatory landscape is key as well. So, how do you manage this over at Fiserv?
Leah Ko: Great question. I think we, because we operate in so many markets for decades, um, we do have very deep expertise in those markets. We have on-the-ground teams or local teams in, in product, tech, um, sales, legal, compliance, regulatory, like we, we have the local teams who really understand the local markets to help our merchants navigate the local regulatory environment. We are also, you know, a regulated company. We have local licenses. Um, we need to meet all the regulatory requirements, uh, you know, as Fiserv. So I think that really comes with, that's our part of our DNA with our licenses, with our legal entity, with our local, global presence and local expertise. That's how we enable our merchants, right, to be able to operate locally and knowing that they have a partner who, um, is familiar with the local landscape and who is, you know, very equipped to support them in those markets.
FinTech TV Host: And of course, at a gathering such as Money 2020, we tend to look towards the future to see what's coming next. So, when you're thinking about the next era at Fiserv, what is on the horizon and what is the vision?
Leah Ko: Great question. Uh, I think, as Takki mentioned in his, uh, announcement of launching Commerce Hub, right? So I think for enterprise clients, our vision is to continue to build out our one global platform, which is Commerce Hub, to simplify the complexity for our merchants and also to help them have more levers to generate revenue, right? So in Commerce Hub, not only, not only we have a full suite of value-added services, we also can enable, uh, embedded finance, for example, right, embedding financial services, uh, into our partner, our clients', our partners' ecosystem so that they can provide that embedded experience to their merchants and also monetize, like, the transaction flows happening on their platform. So that, I think, that's our vision for enterprise clients. For, um, SMB clients, you know, that's continued to build out, uh, our Clover, uh, platform. I think Clover is an all-inclusive SMB operating system. Um, of course, we will facilitate, continue to facilitate payments, um, on Clover. We're also building more of the agentic, um, tools and intelligence we talked about to enable small businesses to grow. So, so make sure that their business, their websites are discoverable by other AI agents, right? So, like, a lot of the value-added services on Clover, and we're gonna deliver to our SMB merchants. Another big, um, vision and strategy for Clover is also embedding software, uh, into the Clover device, right? Clover is not only a hardware device but also an intelligent software layer, and that's where we will pick our industry verticals. Of course, restaurants, um, is, is our strongest vertical. We continue to invest in embedding more value-added services into the restaurant vertical. And such as, you know, high-yield savings accounts, Clover Capital, like all, all that to double down on that vertical. We also launched Clover Practice Pay, which is on the healthcare vertical to serve dentist offices and then the healthcare providers. Um, we roll out more on the kind of industry vertical solutions on Clover.
FinTech TV Host: Well, Leah, I appreciate your time. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule here at Money 2020 to simplify and break down all your work at Fiserv.
Leah Ko: Thank you for having me. My pleasure.
