Checkout.com’s CFO will become president and COO with a plan to disrupt payments in the U.S.—and take on Stripe

“I think 2023 is definitely going to be about payments efficiency and acceptance rates and optimization for the bottom line,” Céline Dufétel of Checkout.com, a London-based online payments company, told me. 

Dufétel was promoted from CFO to president of the company last week; she’ll retain her COO function. She is based in New York and leading the expansion into the U.S. to become a disruptor of legacy systems in the payments industry. Checkout.com plans to take on fintech competitors like Stripe. But meeting a challenge isn’t something new to Dufétel. While studying applied mathematics, economics, and finance at the École Polytechnique in Palaiseau, France, she served in the French navy and was the only woman serving on a 200-person oil tanker.

Some of Checkout.com’s global customers include Sony, Alibaba, and the crypto exchange company Binance. In the U.S., Checkout.com has launched a partnership with GE HealthCare to standardize its global payments. Through a single API integration, the company can accept payments across all of its key markets, offering the local payment methods, according to Checkout.com. 

GE HealthCare is an independent company following its recent spin-off from General Electric. “The digital layer is becoming more and more important in our industry,” GE HealthCare CFO Helmut Zodl told me in December. 

Dufétel, who joined Checkout.com in August 2021, will keep the COO responsibilities under her umbrella, including all operational and go-to-market teams (like finance and marketing). While in her previous post—as COO and CFO of T. Rowe Price—she earned a spot on Fortune’s 2020 40 Under 40 list. Nirupam Sinha, SVP of corporate finance and strategy at Checkout.com, was promoted to CFO. Sinha, joined the company in November 2021, also coming from T. Rowe Price.

But fintechs have cooled off somewhat, at least in the eyes of investors. In early 2022, Checkout.com announced it raised $1 billion in its Series D funding round at a valuation of $40 billion. By the end of the year, the company reduced its internal tax valuation to around $11 billion. Similarly, Stripe, which was valued by private investors at $95 billion in 2021, cut the internal value of its shares by 28% in July.

“When you compare us to Stripe, the common point is both provide end-to-end proprietary technology, where you’ve got direct integration into local…