Worldpay Inc.

My career has been mostly focusing on companies, helping companies get paid and conduct business across border.

I spent a couple of decades on the operator side with American Express, Visa, WorldPay, and UL, starting FTC Global.

We are a boutique international growth partner.

We help companies expand, as you mentioned, either direction into the U.S. or from the U.S. across the globe.

But I always said, well, you know, you are a bit thick at maths and you're not very good at that and you're not very good at that.

But then other times can be in a meeting with a big client like Worldpay that we did Empowering Women in the Workplace with and talking through such high convoluted stuff that it makes no sense that I'm a bit daft.

And I've built a business from nothing.

I knew nothing about running a company.

And I actually, I know I've told you this before, but I just put them all in touch.

I just say, right, WorldPay are offering me that.

Here's the email from WorldPay.

Fucking fight it out amongst yourselves.

I'm not

We won the best payments initiative in open banking there.

That was a really good sort of strong award for us because we're up against some major players in the open banking space, not least the likes of WorldPay and TrueLayer.

And the campaign that led up to it has been down to the hard work of our, not just our product and development team, but also I'd like to say my sales teams, because we're really getting out there now and promoting what Jasper does to quite a broad range of potential new customers.

Primarily focused on the iGaming sector, but we're now starting to see a lot of interest in other more left field verticals, such as financial services, lending, even online travel as well.

And here's the reality of the market too.

Shoppers are saying the same thing, right? There's a company, Worldpay.

If you're familiar with them, they're a payments company.

They had surveyed people in a couple of different countries this year, and among the people that were actually open to shopping with AI, More than half still wanted to approve every purchase themselves.

I mean, I suppose lastly on it, obviously there are big companies out there in the payment space that, you know, they've developed already their own agentic commerce standards.

You look at Google, maybe Stripe, WorldPay.

Do you think that will have maybe an impact on what they build? I mean, I don't think they have...

You know, they're not mandated to implement any changes the FSB introduces.

Today's guest is Eric Queathem, founder and CEO of Velocity.

Eric spent nearly a decade at WorldPay leading global strategy and growth.

He and I actually crossed paths there.

Super happy about that.

Thanks for having me and good to see you as always.

Absolutely, absolutely.

You know, as you and I spent a lot of time at WorldPay, we've seen transactions in the millions, the billions and the trillions, right, move across the globe.

As you kind of start to see the back end of how those payments actually happen, what was the gaps that you started to notice that that led to the evolution that led to you starting Velocity?

Um, we work with the leading networks like Visa to do global payouts.

We work with the leading PSPs like Worldpay and Stripe.

And the commonality of all of that is that we believe value is coming on-chain in different forms, and it's the same problem set, which is how do you build secure, scalable and trusted technology, and how do you build scalable, trusted compliance and regulatory frameworks, and you abstract away that complexity.

So that's what we do at scale now in a global fashion with some of the leading partners and platforms, and partners integrate into our APIs and increasingly now through MCPs, um, to access our infrastructure to build quickly.