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Interview: Mariano Albera, CTO Checkout.com
Checkout.com’s CTO has spent most of his career in the e-commerce industry – and now he is applying what he learned to the finance sector that serves it
Mariano Albera describes himself as “a software engineer who was demoted to chief technology officer” (CTO).
Now at global payments processing company Checkout.com, Albera heads up the operational and customer-facing IT team, made up of around 600 IT professionals. This is a significant portion of the fintech’s total workforce of 2,000, which – if you add in the product-focused professionals – sees his remit involve nearly half the staff.
Set up in 2012, Checkout.com is a payment service provider with business customers including eBay, Vinted, Pinterest and Klarna using its platform. It transacted $300bn worth of payments last year.
While the firm provides merchants with payment processing capabilities via its cloud platform, Albera says he remains a coder at heart: “I wrote code for a living for many, many years and I was very happy doing that. Then, around 2007, somebody was crazy enough to want me to be their CTO.”
While he heads up a department spread across the globe, taking charge of tech infrastructure and security among other things, Albera says writing code is his “passion”, adding: “I still love to code, which I do regularly.”
Checked in
Albera joined the company five years ago after being convinced to make the move by Checkout.com’s founder and CEO, Guillaume Pousaz. He took up the role of senior vice-president of engineering and became CTO in 2023. Before joining Checkout.com, he had held the CTO role in Expedia’s business-to-business division, headed up digital developments at Thomas Cook, and was CIO at travel firm Opodo. He also spent a couple of years in the energy sector at OVO Energy, where he was CTO.
Checkout.com is his first job directly in the financial services sector, but he says his focus has always been on helping businesses transact online, whether with the companies doing so, or at a payments service provider as he finds himself today.
“A large part of our business comes from e-commerce, and I have spent my entire career working in that sector – mostly in the travel industry, which is one of the industries that moved faster into the digital area,” Albera tells Computer Weekly.
It was in these previous roles where Albera found himself on “the other side”, he said. These roles were within companies trying to sell products and services that require payments services at the end of the process, like those offered by Checkout.com.
“One of the interesting things about moving to Checkout.com is that for most my career I used services like Checkout.com’s, now I get to see it from the other side,” he says.
Albera also believes his work history has given him an understanding of the different ways organisations work depending on their size, stating: “I've been lucky enough in my career that I have spent half of it, maybe a bit more, in bigger companies, with the other half in smaller companies.”
While Checkout.com was not so long ago a fintech startup and is relatively small in comparison to Thomas Cook, it has a significant footprint which is still growing. Where its IT is concerned, Checkout.com professionals are spread across the world, in places such as Paris, Estonia and the US. The main location for IT professionals at the company is London, according to Albera.
This year, the company is expanding its international presence. It recently launched its services in Canada and Japan, provides local processing in Saudi Arabia and is launching in Brazil. These regional expansions require significant investment in IT infrastructure to ensure the performance of a transaction is maximised and the cost minimised for customers depending on where they are.
When expanding into new countries, Checkout.com uses it global platform on a single infrastructure and single core. “But what we do is we have to add the local specific connectivity, with the local suppliers,” adds Albera. “Every localisation project has its own nuances. Brazil is very different from Canada, and Japan is very different from Europe. In the financial area, we have different local accounting rules, so it’s quite a complex subject.”
In most of the countries where it processes locally, the company employs local people to perform operational jobs and sometimes puts in local engineers. It also has datacentres in the regions, but not in every country.
Current projects
The company builds and runs its payment products in the cloud and is moving to a multicloud model where it can automatically access the best cloud to meet its requirements. It currently only uses AWS cloud, but by adding service providers, “multicloud will allow Checkout.com to be more resilient, perform at scale and to build faster”, says Albera.
This is a “massive infrastructure project”, according to Albera, who says it means that a transaction can be processed in the most appropriate cloud – based on certain metrics, logic and rationale – at any given time. The company is currently integrating Microsoft’s Azure cloud into its infrastructure as part of this project and plans to utilise it next year.
Albera believes that one of the big opportunities, in terms of resilience, is that it will automatically use an alternative cloud, if the cloud goes down for any reason. “Of course, a multicloud infrastructure is more complex than a single cloud. You need to invest more money, you need to have more people and you need to create more complex processes,” he says. “But it adds a lot of resilience and a lot of performance. With the volume that we are processing and how fast we are growing, it was the right time to say, ‘Okay, let’s do this massive infrastructure project’.”
“Multicloud will allow Checkout.com to be more resilient, perform at scale and to build faster”
Mariano Albera, Checkout.com
Checkout.com is also integrating artificial intelligence (AI) throughout its business and is currently looking at agentic commerce, which could see AI handle payments autonomously. “It’s a very hot topic and too early to really understand how this is going to work,” says Albera. “But we want to be ready with all the infrastructure pieces needed. We’ve been using machine learning for more than five years now, and we use it a lot, especially on the performance aspect of the business.”
For example, AI is used to check for potential fraud during transactions that take milliseconds, and the company uses machine learning to run 200 different optimisations on a single transaction to ensure that it meets the best possible performance. But Albera believes AI can go beyond its industrial-scale application and become personalised for human workers, adding: “It’s a helper that is sitting next to you and with you all the time.”
He says AI is now filtering into every part of the business and is being adopted individually by staff, as well as departmentally and across the company: “Everyone at Checkout.com is leveraging AI and should continue to do so to help them do things better.”
The next step, he says, will see non-technical staff build AI apps, and he believes the company must enable this: “There’s going to be a lot of people in my company creating apps. We need to build the framework and the platform for them to be able to do that safely and securely.”
It is technology such as AI that has changed the role of a CTO and given them additional resources, he concludes, believing that the challenges are keeping up with the pace of change: “The big difference right now in being a CTO, compared with five years ago, is that you can do a lot more with the same capacity and the same people that you have now.”
