Ceri Griffiths, Super Payments, The Complete Checkout Playbook for UK Retailers

Ceri Griffiths sells for Super Payments, which processes cards, wallets, pay by bank and buy now pay later for businesses at nought percent fees. Before that he sold retail finance for V12, Close Brothers, Klarna, Zip and Zopa, and before any of it he spent a decade collecting the debt. He joins host Jamie Hamer to explain what consumer finance is actually worth at a checkout, and what it costs.

The mechanics are specific. Lenders compete on four things, price, approval rate, distribution and risk appetite, which is why large merchants run two in sequence, so a near prime lender catches the customers the prime one declines. He puts most of a large retailer checkout through cards and wallets, with credit the minority share, a correction he only saw after leaving credit for enterprise payments and coming back. Integration decides more deals than product quality: his benchmark is three lines of code, and he has seen a Shopify merchant live in an hour. His own method is to say nothing first, ask why three times, and leave the buyer with three things to carry into a meeting he is not in.

The second half of the episode is about cost. Interchange and scheme fees cannot be absorbed by anyone, so what a nought percent provider removes is its own markup, and the money is made on credit instead. He is direct that processing statements are built to be hard to read, and that the gateway, chargeback and refund lines look like rounding errors until they compound. On the July regulation he argues a level field is a good outcome, and on harm he says the people who miss payments are the ones with commitments, which skews older than the headlines suggest. It closes on the collections floor, the debt charities, and a lockdown story about glow sticks.

About Super Payments
Super Payments was founded in 2022 by Samir Desai CBE, co-founder of Funding Circle. It offers businesses payment processing at nought percent fees, earning instead through optional paid add-ons and commission from lenders when shoppers use its credit product. It raised £22.5m in pre-seed funding led by Accel in August 2022.