London Fintech Podcast
00:00:00 · Rohit Mishra, Tony Clark
[00:00:00] S0: Agents are the new users. The conversion from any AI, originated session is 2.4 x higher than, if it was coming from a traditional search. And that the reason why that's happening is because consumers are finding a lot more trust, a lot more information upfront with agents. [00:00:16] S1: When an agent completes a purchase, who's who's actually responsible if it goes wrong then? [00:00:20] S0: It's a million dollar question, Tony. What we have done is also completely reimagined our defenses. As the amount of attacks have significantly increased, the actual amount of ad actors that pass through our systems has significantly declined. Removing friction is an infinite game, so there shall always be a little more friction that we can keep chipping away at. As humans, we are programmed to overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity. Whoever your users are, whether your users are consumers or businesses, they will be represented by an agent. That's something for you to embrace and not fight.
00:00:54 · Tony Clark, Rohit Mishra
[00:00:54] S1: Hi. I'm Tony Clark, and welcome to the London Fintech Podcast. Each episode, I speak to the people changing the industry to help you stay ahead of what's next in fintech. This podcast is brought to you by Next Wave Consulting, the firm that I founded in 2020 with one purpose, to help build better financial services through technology. Enjoy the show, and please do subscribe. Most leaders in financial services now accept that AI is changing how customers find things. Far fewer have worked out what happens when the software doesn't just recommend the purchase, but makes it. My guest today can watch that shift happening in real time. Rohit Mishra is VP of product at Shopify, where he leads payments, tax, risk, and cross border. Shopify is the platform millions of independent businesses sell through, and on the company's own figures, its payments arm has now processed more than a trillion dollars. Shopify also sits inside both of the main industry efforts, deciding how AI agents will be permitted to pay for things. So Rohit can tell us what's real in energetic commerce, what's coming next, and what you should be doing about it. Rohit, welcome to the London Fintech Podcast. [00:02:03] S0: Thank you so much, Tony. Thanks for... Thank you for having me. Looking forward to this chat.
00:02:03 · Rohit Mishra, Tony Clark
[00:02:03] S0: Thank you so much, Tony. Thanks for... Thank you for having me. Looking forward to this chat. [00:02:07] S1: Me too. Big topic. So absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you kick us off a bit by telling us a bit about Shopify, what the modern Shopify covers? Because this is a big business. It's a broad space. I think on the website, you say sell everywhere people shop online and in person across AI and on social locally and globally. Well, that's a lot, but maybe you can you can guide me. Warren, what is Shopify doing out there these days?
00:02:35 · Rohit Mishra
[00:02:35] S0: Absolutely. So Shopify started with our founder, Toby Lutke, about twenty years ago, realizing that there wasn't any good piece of software to start and build a new business. And his hypothesis, which has proven to be very true, is that a lot of people aspire to be entrepreneurs. There will be a lot more entrepreneurs if we if we made the journey more easier. And and so that is Shopify's core mission that we've been working on for the last twenty years is how do we enable more businesses to start and scale and find buyers wherever buyers are. That has evolved over time. You know, we started with desktop, and then then mobile was a big big change, and social was a big change. We expanded to selling in person with with our retail offering. And then over the last, I would say, eighteen to twenty four months, how do we enable brands that trust us, work with us, entrepreneurs that work with us? How do we enable them to leverage agented commerce and make sure that as new agents and new modalities keep coming up, they're prepared, they're ready? That's been a big part of our focus. So Shopify today serves millions millions of merchants across 175 countries, and we help them sell wherever their their their customers are. Online continues to be a very important large channel for us, but we have a very large retail presence where shop... Merchants can use Shopify POS in their stores to sell as well as selling on different social channels, selling on different agents. And then we... And we are always looking at new ways of of how buyers are approaching commerce and how we can make sure our merchants are prepared for it.
00:04:22 · Tony Clark, Rohit Mishra
[00:04:22] S1: Wow. That covers a lot. So POS is point of sale, isn't it? So those are those machines that are on the on the counter in all of all of the retail stores. [00:04:32] S0: Yes. These are these are the these are the payment terminals that you see... That you interact with, but also what the store staff is using to manage their inventory, manage their catalog, manage all their fulfillment options. What Shopify does is both provide the back office that that brands use to run their business, but also a set of additional services. So, obviously, it's our checkout product. We have payments. We take care of your making sure we are protecting you from fraud, taxes. We have we provide additional financial services. We have a capital... Very large capital product that gives merchants ability to get more credit based on the business activity we see so that they can continue to grow their business. So Shopify is very focused on the entrepreneur and making sure that anything that they need to grow and scale their business, we are stepping up and providing them the best possible service. [00:05:32] S1: Yeah. Deeply, deeply integrated sort of multichannel experience there. Yeah. Okay. So that was sort of very quick overview. And as I suspected, there's more to it than I thought five minutes ago. Rohit, your role at Shopify, what do you cover? And and and and what matters the most in the context of the payments part of the business, which I think is where you're aligned.
00:05:57 · Rohit Mishra
[00:05:57] S0: Yeah. So my role at Shopify is I lead product teams at Shopify that focus on payments that focus on the things around payments, fraud and risk, money movement, and agentic payments now, obviously. My my teams also work on Shop Pay, which is our consumer wallet checkout product, which hopefully you have used, Tony, in in the past. Mostly, I introduced myself as a person who works on the purple Shop Pay button because more consumers are familiar with that. And I also work here on how we can help our merchants manage their sales tax compliance. And and my... One of my long term focuses at Shopify has been enabling entrepreneurs to build global businesses. So anything that you need to sell internationally, some of that work at Shopify is is within my teams. I spent about ten years here, so I've done a few different things in my in my time here. Top of mind for us, obviously, agent... We spend a bunch of time thinking about agents. Agents are the new users. And so just as in the old world, would have thought a lot about what users need. We think a lot about what agents need, what their... What would make our experiences better and more optimized for agents. So that's that's that's a big part of our focus now, but we continue to work on all the other ways. You know, how do we maximize each basis point of of payment success rate for our merchants, give them more payment methods, better resiliency, less fraud. Those are some evergreen topics that that continue to occupy our mind. We're obviously investing a lot in Shop Pay, which is our consumer wallet and checkout product, and we can talk more about Shop Pay and the role that plays in in binding together all of these multichannel experiences that Shopify provides.