In this episode, we sit down with Marc-Henri Desportes, CEO of Worldline, and Richard Straver, founder of OPP, to explore the evolving role of embedded payments in platforms and marketplaces across Europe. Our discussion highlights the challenges of traditional payment systems and how their solutions streamline complex transactions—like managing multiple merchants in a single checkout process—through advanced features such as split payments and integrated escrow services.
We delve into the critical aspects of secure transactions, revenue generation, and efficient KYC processes that simplify merchant onboarding. The conversation focuses on Europe’s diverse and highly regulated market, including key regions like the UK, Switzerland, and Scandinavia. While global expansion is on the horizon, our guests explain why Europe remains a strategic priority, offering unique opportunities to innovate within its rigorous regulatory landscape.
Whether you’re a platform operator looking to enhance payment integration or simply interested in understanding the intricacies of the marketplace ecosystem, this episode offers valuable insights into navigating and thriving in this space. 
Read the full transcript of our conversation below.
Mike Giambattista
Today on Customerland. I am honored and flattered, frankly, to be speaking with Marc-Henri Desportes, who is Chief Executive Officer at Worldline, and Richard Straver, who is founder of OPP, on the eve of some big announcements in their world. But first of all, thank you both for joining me. I know you’re very, very busy today with your agendas, but this is exciting news is exciting news and I’m thinking just for the context of the conversation if, marc-henri, if you could just give us a brief of your role at Worldline, and then Richard, if you wouldn’t mind doing the same for your role at OPP.
Marc-Henri Desportes
Yeah, okay, if you wish. Briefly, it’s pretty simple. As for myself, indeed, I’m the CEO of Worldline, so in this role, I’m in charge of the full scope of the company, and until recently, I was also running directly merchant services. Now we have on board a new head with Paul-Mael Clark, so I’m relying on him for this part and I’m just concentrating on my CEO job.
Richard Straver
All right, very good, I think that’s me. I’m Richard Straver. I’m the founder of OPP, or otherwise called the online payment platform. Um, I founded actually the business about 15 years ago but, uh, the first seven years we were a web development company and I myself am a developer and UX designer, so I used to build. For the first seven years, I built numerous platforms and marketplaces, and that’s also where we kind of found out that there was still a lot of friction if you wanted to integrate embedded payments or the old embedded payments. As we see it, that was already in the market kind of back then. And then we, yeah, basically just decided to build it ourselves, also to provide something better to the clients that we were already building platforms for. And it was going so well that at some point we stopped building platforms and marketplaces and just kept building OPP, and that’s what I’m still doing today.
Mike Giambattista
It appears to have been a very smart move. So the announcement just a couple of days ago I’m going to read this just to make sure I get it just right uh, worldline and OPP unveil groundbreaking embedded payments solution for platforms and marketplaces in Europe. I know this is big news because I’m familiar with the space, but there may be people in fact I’m sure there are people listening and watching this who may not understand the importance of this particular integration and the announcement. So, for context, maybe we could just talk a little bit about some of the unique challenges that marketplaces face in the payments world, because they are unique and I don’t know, Richard, if you want to take that, or Marc-Henri, if you’d rather.
Richard Straver
Yeah, I mean it’s great. Yeah, kind of connecting to what I kind of said earlier. So at the end of the day, what platforms and marketplaces want is to provide the best user journey, the most frictionless environment for a seller and a buyer, or anyone that’s offering services and goods on the marketplace and the one that wants to purchase to have the most seamless, frictionless experience in doing that. And when you look at the payment landscape or the payment technology that was previously built was really geared towards web shops. The real first wave of online commerce were the typical single point web shops where you’re purchasing something from that particular business and that’s it. So you make a transaction and it goes to that business and kind of, we’re done. When you look at the marketplace, there’s a suddenly marketplace in between and you have hundreds of thousands or perhaps even millions of merchants that need to or want to receive a transaction through that marketplace. So there you already see that the core dynamic and fundamentals there are just very different to what you see what is needed for web shops.
So one of the first things I think we spend a lot of time on is to make sure that any transaction could be split into as many parts, as you want To enable checkouts that have multiple products that are sold by multiple merchants and to avoid having multiple transactions but simply have one transaction going. There is that, of course, building these cool user journeys. Also, the marketplace often wants to earn or provide some revenue or get some revenue out of these new services that they build. So what they want to do ideally is to, yeah, derive fees mid-air from one or multiple of these splits and to have all the level of flexibility there as well. So we completely automated that as well.
And then you see that a lot of these platforms and marketplaces try to make journeys more secure than what you had previously out there in the market. So, looking at, for example, renting something or buying something on a secondhand marketplace, what you want to do is make sure that the products actually have been arrived before the money is already at that merchant, because these merchants again can be millions of merchants, could be consumers, businesses, and then you don’t, you cannot guarantee that that these merchants are, uh, legit, uh, I mean up until a certain point perhaps you can, can, but not in all cases. So if you want to do this scalable-y, you want to employ or deploy escrow to ensure that the parameters or the products have been delivered or the rental house is actually available and you can check in before the funds are disappearing towards the merchant. So that’s just a couple of these and, last but not least, it’s onboarding, so the KYC process.
In order for platforms and marketplaces to comply with the financial regulation, they need to make sure that the recipient merchants of these payments have been KYC’d by a financial institution, KYC by a financial institution, and that is often a big threshold or friction point of conversion and stuff like that. And also with the older embedded technology, you really have to go to the PSP and do the KYC there, even potentially with contracts and paperwork and stuff like that. So what we did is we made APIs that you can directly integrate in the marketplace and platform so the user never has to leave that environment to finalize its KYC and all of these elements and more. But I want to keep on going. All of these elements are unique to the marketplace platform, dynamic, and that’s the stuff that we built and offered to the market.
Mike Giambattista
So I think at a future conversation I’d love to get into the details of how you’ve managed to package all that together, because it’s a lot of functionality that you’re wrapping together and a lot of its complex and a lot of it, frankly, historically hasn’t played well together. So those challenges I’m sure were huge. I’d like to talk a little bit about the relationship between Worldline and OPP and maybe, mark Henri, if maybe you could speak to that a little bit, the relationship between Worldline and OPP. How did it start? How has it matured? What got it to this point and, if I may, why this choice in partners?
Marc-Henri Desportes
yeah, no sure, sure indeed. Uh, in one line we had this uh reach and size of uh of capacities to under payments uh, throughout Europe in terms of high number of countries, a lot of in-store payments, online capabilities, but always more the traditional web shop handling way, and we knew this economy of platforms was ramping up and you had more and more marketplaces, not only the big ones In Europe. A lot of country means a lot of different solutions in each country, so a long tail of platforms being built that were needing a simple solution for what Richard explained bringing together buyer and seller, so onboarding them on both sides and ending the flow of money between them. With all the rules and regulations. This is hyper-regulated.
Everything in these different steps has to follow certain rules that are constantly evolving and being increased, and so the people having the smart ideas about what marketplaces to build, these visionaries they needed something really simple, so this interface that would allow this connectivity to be extremely simple and scalable, given the diversity of the exchange you had to manage and we had the size and the capability to serve the payments.
We did not have this interface and this flexibility and that’s why we looked for a solution and we scanned the market and we found out that OPP was already very advanced in these capabilities, already covering a significant share of the market in big geographies like UK and Germany, like UK and Germany not having yet the capability to sell the full European market with all the payment means.
So there was a natural fit in working together and so that’s why we made this deal. And then we worked in making and bringing the solution together to the level we are presenting today, which is, we believe, early forward in the industry, because that’s the first time a payment solution for the platform is really built on something that was designed from the beginning by OPP. We think we’re at the payment capability, but the interface by OPP was designed from inception, from the beginning, to serve the need of the marketplace in the easiest, fastest possible way, and that’s this ease of use, this efficiency of the processes, that makes the life of the marketplace builder so simple. That seduced us and they were incredible proof points. I think OPP is handling millions. I think you reached 28 million merchants connected on your platform. So it shows the capability to under very high numbers in a very efficient way, makes the life of the marketplace super easy, and that’s what seduced us.
Mike Giambattista
That’s a great word.
Richard Straver
Sorry if we can add a small thing to that. We’ve been collaborating with Worldline for years already, so we never had our own acquiring, so we really leveraged other acquirers and other gateways and we kind of had the choice. We always made a smart routing engine so that we could route payments to different acquirers and gateways as was needed or see fit. But with Broadline we have the best experiences already during the previous years. And one key point there, I think, is eBay Kleinanzeigens. It’s the number one marketplace in Germany, serving 80 million consumers, and there together we launched a couple of years ago, which was also a super successful collaboration. So that also gave the confidence on both sides that we can do big things together.
Mike Giambattista
Fantastic. Is this embedded payment solution in market right now, or is it about to be in market? Where do we stand in the timeline right now?
Marc-Henri Desportes
It is in market, it is clearly in market, it’s live and, of course, we started by signing on the momentum created by OPP, a certain number of first names, but now, with the announcement, with the last effort we did, we make it much more scalable, much more easier in terms of APIs, developments, payment solution, integration, speed of the various processes. So that’s why we are now in a position to accelerate and add a very important feature, one that will make a big, big difference coming in the coming weeks. It is the possibility to receive physical payment as well. You know we always think about the online part of the transaction, but in many cases, typically when you have a delivery of a good, of a service at home, people feel good about paying at the moment of delivery and so you need to have a payment. Also. A physical payment possibility and bringing or tap on mobile solution from the Warrant stack in combination with the OPP stuff, is bringing it to a next level. But it’s very live and Richard can share some additional numbers about it.
Richard Straver
Yeah, so we have currently over 200 different platforms and marketplaces that have integrated OPP in Europe. Through them, we have 28 million merchants that are live on the platform that we’ve onboarded Currently. We have about a million new merchants onboarding every month, and so most of those are consumer merchants, so consumer sellers on the Kleinanzeigens or Marktplatz or Gumtree, for that matter. So, yes, we were already in the market for a couple of years and providing again payments for over 200 platforms, but at that moment and still we were verticalized, so we served marketplaces that were purely secondhand or purely leisure or purely, say, an auction on certain categories.
Now this is good, but what we want to do is going forward, also provide horizontal platforms with exactly the same payment capabilities. And what are horizontal platforms? The likes like Shopify, where every new merchant can potentially be a very different categoric merchant. So that’s one. Right now we’re verticalized, we’ll also add the horizontal to it, and right now we are online, but we’ll also add offline now with the POS capabilities. So, instead of just vertical online, we now have also horizontal offline, which makes a full embedded and real new embedded payment experience.
Mike Giambattista
That’s a big deal. The quantity and pace at which you’re onboarding merchants is wild. I can’t imagine what that must look like operationally.
Richard Straver
Thank you, how huge and stressed, the team must be.
Marc-Henri Desportes
It’s clearly the strength of the OPP team is to have optimized this onboarding process with breakthrough automation in a way that is incredibly efficient, made a huge difference there, because to reach this level, you really need to be super, super optimized in every step of the online process so that you don’t have any exception or any hiccups, and that’s really the incredible strength of this solution can we spend the last few moments?
Mike Giambattista
I know we had a very limited window here for this conversation, but the last few minutes just talking about your rollout plans, geographically, where and when you’ll be going to take the platform next.
Marc-Henri Desportes
Without Europe, clearly covering full Europe, including UK and Switzerland, so it’s beyond the political Europe Scandinavia is included and that will be our core focus for the period to come. Then later on, at some point, go global. It’s really clearly. What we are focusing on right now is Europe.
Mike Giambattista
Okay, yeah, there are going to be a handful of people listening and watching who will be wondering about your US plans, but we can leave that for another day.
Marc-Henri Desportes
Yeah, it’s the next steps. We’ll be following up. We have some small activity with ISVs in the US right now online, but I think bringing EOV solution has really been optimized for Europe and the intensity of regulation in Europe Michel has seen that. That developed incredible knowledge. I think we all know that Europe always stands ahead of the crowd when it comes to regulation. So once you have achieved this, you’re ready for all the rest.
To say it in simple terms, we believe we live for the solution for marketplaces with what we are doing together. It’s going to be better in terms of easiness of onboarding. A marketplace can be onboarded in a matter of a couple of weeks. It will be faster than competition when it comes to merchant onboarding. You will have a better reach in terms of local payment methods. We’ll get to the best level of compliance with European regulation, which is not a detail because it’s evolving and slowly but surely, you have many solutions that we fell a bit out of sync with this regulation. So that’s what we are bringing. Our conviction is you create a new platform today in Europe. That’s the best solution for you.
