Founder of Checkout.com, Guillaume Pousaz

Guillaume Pousaz is a Swiss billionaire entrepreneur located in Dubai and he is the CEO and founder of Checkout.com, a global payments solution provider that helps businesses and communities succeed in the digital economy. They provide flexible solutions that adapt to a person’s needs, important information that help them make informed decisions about their payments, and expertise they can rely on as they negotiate the complexity of an ever-changing environment.

Pousaz earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from HEC Lausanne after studying mathematical engineering at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale De Lausanne. He aspired to be an investment banker at first, but after his father was diagnosed with cancer in 2005, he dropped out of university. He subsequently relocated to California to pursue his dream of becoming a surfer. Pousaz joined the payments firm International Payments Consultants (IPC) in 2006, but soon resigned to start his own company. After that, he collaborated with IPC’s chief of sales to launch NetMerchant, a US-to-Europe money transfer service. The business lasted till 2009.

Pousaz then bought Mauritius-based SMS Pay for $300,000 over three years in 2009. Pousaz established Opus Payments in Singapore in 2009, allowing Hong Kong firms to accept payments from buyers all over the world. In 2012, Opus Payments changed its name to Checkout.com. The company was formed to help merchants and their consumers with online payment processing.

He has spent the last decade working with some of the world’s most inventive organisations to find solutions to challenging payment issues. Checkout.com is now one of the largest fintech companies in the world, with 19 offices stretching from San Francisco to Hong Kong and a workforce of over 1,500 individuals.