London Fintech Podcast
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.
00:07:49 · Tony Clark
[00:07:49] S1: Yeah. And you said the agents are the new customers, so... And I think that's really gonna be the theme for this conversation. So we'll dig into that in a moment. Perhaps to start, I am curious. My own research has highlighted that you're working on the industry efforts for agentic commerce. So this is the protocols that will enable agents to go shopping on our on our behalf. Can you say a bit about that? I mean, how standardized is is agentic shopping out there at the moment, and and what are you doing to to help bring some standards into into this space?
00:08:22 · Rohit Mishra
[00:08:22] S0: Yeah. At Shopify, we are big believers in protocols. We have been over the last... I would say, like, when we've been working with w three c, which is the web consortium on on payment standards on the web. So we have brought some similar thinking to agent recovers. Late last year, we collaborated deeply with our friends at Google and many other companies in building together Universal Commerce Protocol. This UCP is is a standard protocol that defines completely embedded agent ecommerce. How does... How can an agent and a merchant reason about what does the merchant offer, the products they offer, but also all the other specific nature of of that business, the payment methods, delivery methods, fulfillment steps that they offer, and agent and and and the merchant systems can can can negotiate that completely completely in a programmatic fashion. And so UCP has been a big part of our focus in bringing together... Bringing that protocols together. UCP... Think of UCP as the overall checkout negotiation between the agent trying to buy a thing and the merchant platform trying to sell a thing. And then if you go in in a more micro nature, then we are working with the FIDO Alliance. We are working on things like the AP two payments framework, which which has mandates and consent. We're working with just very recently Poppy, which is... Which came from Sierra, which is how do you identify the agents or protocol for that. And so there's there's a there's a bunch of different initiatives that we have. We're also increasingly partner... Partnering with the major card networks on how agentic tokens work and what's needed from merchant and a wallet perspective to make agentic tokens really great. We really we really believe that in a positive sum thinking at Shopify, and the more these protocols get get standardized and and and and power a rich experience, I think it will be great for great for our merchants, but just great for the industry overall in driving agent e commerce forward. So we spend... We are spending a a bunch of our energy in both creating and sharpening these protocols on on... That that will constitute it into commerce.