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Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
Peter Dougherty, President of Spreedly | Episode 454
Growth shouldn’t stall at the border. We sit down with Peter Dougherty, President of Spreedly, to unpack how an open payments platform helps global brands launch faster, reduce vendor risk, and optimize authorization rates without ripping out their stack. Peter traces the evolution from card‑centric orchestration to a broader layer that now includes tokenization, a secure token vault, fraud and KYC options, and connections to multiple processors and alternative payment methods. The takeaway: best‑of‑breed no longer means complexity and long timelines - it means resilience, data‑driven choices, and faster expansion.
Peter also looks ahead to a future where agents become the front end of commerce. Discovery, selection, and purchase compress into milliseconds, and payments infrastructure has to keep up. We dig into how mandates, consent, and spending limits will work when agents transact on our behalf; how liability flows when something goes wrong; and why token management becomes the backbone for secure, delegated payments. He shares why platforms that can safely feed agents with PCI‑sensitive data will win as volumes surge across regions and rails.
We ground the hype in reality too. Payments is the fastest moving oil tanker - innovation is constant, but adoption takes time. EMV took decades; stablecoins still trail cards and the fastest‑growing APMs. For leaders, the smart move is to build behind an abstraction layer that lets you A/B test processors, adopt new methods, and swap tools without disruption.
If you’re pushing into new markets or preparing for agentic commerce, this conversation will help you rethink checkout, time to market, and resilience at scale.
Welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast, where we talk to sea level leaders from across the payments landscape. We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments. We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
SPEAKER_02:Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast. I'm your host, Greg Myers, and today's special guest is Peter Doherty, the president of Spreedly. So, Peter, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show. Awesome. Thanks for having me, Greg. It's good to be here. So before we dive into your career and the company, can you give us a quick snapshot of your personal background, maybe where you grew up, where you call home today, a few things like that?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So from Montreal, grew up in Montreal in Canada. That's where I'm wearing my nice winter Christmas sweater at the moment, you know. We actually just had our company Christmas, we did a Christmas team lunch, which was very nice. And so grew up in Montreal, always, always been in tech in Montreal, spent most or the foundational part of my career at a call it a card present payment startup called Lightspeed Commerce in the in the POS space for 12 years, growing that business from 8 million in revenue to 750 million revenue through IPO, et cetera. And then a couple years ago found Spreebly, and I've been on that journey journey since.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. And prior to your first company, was that the first company, or do you have other people?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that was my first real job. You know, I was there for 12 years. I joined that business, 25 years old, salesperson, and I said, hey, let's let's make a bet. Let's do something fun and learn along the way. And I had the privilege of running all the various different go-to-market functions, doing MA, running teams internationally. It's very rare that you kind of get these unicorn companies that go all the way from 8 million to a billion. And I know there's some luck in it, but I was very lucky that that was the very first company I ever worked for.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. What was uh attractive about Spreedly? Why join Spreedly?
SPEAKER_01:Well, the problem that Spreadly solves was one of the things that I faced at my previous role. And so at its core, as businesses start to grow, they start to face this question of hey, do I have problems in my payment stack that are big enough to warrant looking at having multiple vendors power that or solve that problem for me? And Spreadly starts to starts to answer that question by saying, okay, if I want to have multiple fraud providers, multiple payments processors, multiple open banking providers, Spreadly will power that for you, especially as you get to the enterprise who are multi-region, multi-continent, multi-product, multi-business line. Spreadly sits in the middle and really helps you start to optimize your stack to get the best out of every single bit of your business.
SPEAKER_02:So if you had to give me the elevator pitch, what would that sound like?
SPEAKER_01:Spreadly is an open payments platform that allows merchants like HBO, Time Warner, BMW to grow their business and increase their time to market in new regions or new lines of business without having to make big bets on what are the components that go into their payment stack.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, well, what would you say is the biggest challenge your company is solving for your customers right now?
SPEAKER_01:First, it's time to market, like I mentioned. When you have, and we'll just use an example, if you're a US business and you want to start selling into Mexico or to Canada or to Europe, and you want to start to think about, okay, how do I get into these markets? It often starts with, okay, well, what do I need to do to sell into Mexico or the UK? And that can involve compliance, regulatory, et cetera, but it also often involves fulfillment. How do I actually process payments and fulfill orders in that region? And you might have different regulatory regimes there, you might have different consumer behaviors. You know, debit is obviously much more used in continental Europe than it is here in North America. And when you start to think about how do I enter this new region, more often than not, most vendors that you see in your payment stack are really good at operating in a single region. Very few are good at operating in multiple regions. And so if you're gonna make a bet by saying, oh, I'm gonna, I'll make it up now, not to pick on them, but I'm gonna use Barkley Card in the UK as my payments processor, you're gonna have to make a bet that they're gonna be the vendor versus my existing vendor being really good in the UK. Well, Spreadly will reduce that risk, that enterprise risk, to go and adopt a new vendor, and maybe you're gonna A-B test between two different vendors before you choose somebody for the long term. And I'm just using payments processing as an example. It can be your KYC vendor, it can be your open banking vendor, it can be your premise processor itself. There's a whole bunch of components that go into a payment stack, and we help you reduce the risk of making those decisions. And frankly, make the decisions faster.
SPEAKER_02:So there's a buzzword out there, orchestration. Is that sort of what you're describing?
SPEAKER_01:Spreadly is the foundational brand or name in payments orchestration. We've been doing this now for 15, 16 years. I would say we are do payments orchestration, but it is now only one of the things we do. That's why we refer to ourselves as an open payments platform. Payments orchestration is very card-centric. Hey, I'm going to send this transaction to PSP number one and this transaction to PSP two. That's what we started in. We did that for 15 years. We've done that very effectively for our customers for 15 years, and we continue to do that. But tokenization and managing your token vault is very important, especially in the age of agenti commerce, and how do you actually feed PCI sensitive data to agents to act on your behalf? That's a whole other business line for us now. Fraud and fraud management through Spreeply Protect is another business line for us. And so payments orchestration is a single product, Spreeply Connect. That's where our company grew out of. But now we offer a suite of different products that fill out your payment stack beyond just payments orchestration. And that's the nuance between open payments and payments orchestration.
SPEAKER_02:Gotcha. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. So are most of your customers, would you say, mid-market and national in size?
SPEAKER_01:We definitely started, you know, 15 years ago, startups working in the mid-market, maybe even a little bit in the SMB. But as time has gone by, not only have we matured as an organization, we see bigger and bigger brands trusting Spreebly with their transaction volume. Today there's 60 billion of GMV going through the platform every year, so it's it's quite a bit. And so our brand is more trusted in the market. So we have the enterprise who use Spreebly now. And also, we've also shifted from a market perspective, going from call it the early adopters of this idea of payments orchestration, this niche thing, to now it's more, okay, we're in the early majority. It's much more mainstream. So you're seeing much bigger brands make the decision to move towards this idea of open payments.
SPEAKER_02:Well, what would you say differentiates you from your competitors out there?
SPEAKER_01:I think first is Spreedly is always innovating. We're always looking at what is the payment stack holistically and what does success look like for a payments manager? And so back to the uh you know the nuance between payments orchestration and open payments. Payments 10 years ago, when the idea of payments orchestration was still new, was very card-centric. Then we saw the rise of APMs and LPMs, now tokenization is very hot because of the AgentiCommerce and AgentaCommerce's ravenous hunger for payments data to be able to transact ever fast you know ever more frequently. And so when we talk about why Spreadly is the right choice when you're looking in for an open payments platform, it is because Spreadly provides a platform that touches your entire payment stack versus just being card-centric or just being in a single region. We've also been doing this for quite a while. The infrastructure is enterprise grade, and we have not only innovative startups in the mid-market who use Spreebly, but we also have blue chip names like a priceline or an HBO or the New York Times that use Spreadly as well. And so we our platform can flex from an aspirational business doing$250 million a year and really growing very aggressively to a global enterprise.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. Well, let's talk a little bit about the future. Where do you see the biggest growth opportunity in your segment of payments?
SPEAKER_01:Not to be cliche, but agents is the way. When we talk about the future of payments, even ignoring Spreebly for a second, we're talking about how are agents going to transact on my behalf. If I'm a consumer and I'm looking for a pair of shoes, you know, I go to Adidas.com and I'm going to go browse and look around and try and pick a pair of shoes. And maybe this is just me because sometimes I shop too much. I'm going to spend an hour doing that. If in the world of agents, you're going to say, hey, I need a new pair of sneakers, and they're going to look at all of my past history, they're going to look at my preferences, et cetera. And they're going to make a snap decision within half a second. And they're going to transact so rapidly. And so when we talk about the future of payments, it's about the agents being the front end of commerce. But for the payments infrastructure providers like us, it's going to be how do we feed agents to transact more effectively, but also help them fulfill their mandates on behalf of the consumers that they represent. That is fundamentally the future of payments that we're headed towards, which I'm very excited about. Then you start to get into the whole question of does the infrastructure that's out there today of the card brands and the alternate payment methods, are they ready to support that? What we think is going to be this tremendous boom in transaction volumes that are transacting on the internet. Not that there already isn't a lot, but you think humans shop fast and e-commerce is fast, just wait till agents start making billions of dollars of transactions in milliseconds. It's kind of like the difference between the New York Stock Exchange 20 years ago with traders on the floor to, you know, today it's all programmatic trading and the velocity that happens. That's what's about to hit e-commerce.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's interesting because I have a lot of these discussions, and I'm curious your thoughts. Like, do you see a difference in like a gentic commerce versus the payments? Like to me, they're sort of two separate things, right? Because the commerce part is the search, the discoverability, the fulfillment, and the payments is kind of what we traditionally think as a transaction going through. I mean, do you see it that way or do you see it differently?
SPEAKER_01:Yes and no. So commerce for sure is how do you discover products? How do you choose what pair of sneakers are you gonna buy? Are you gonna buy a pair of Nikes or a pair of Adidas? And then how does it get fulfilled? That's that's not the payments infrastructure. But payments and the payment transaction is integral to that whole experience. And yes, the agent is solving for product discoverability. Are you gonna find some new brand that you've never bought from before? They're gonna make sure that the shipping address is right. But in the transaction, the agent still needs to manage the transaction. And that's why you see the large LLM providers like OpenAI and Google, both of them over the last six months have put out agent payment protocols, different than you know, MCP. That's that's more the data transaction. We're talking about the payments protocols for agents. Because for that commerce transaction to happen, once you've figured out or once the agent has figured out what pair of shoes you're gonna buy, you still have to execute the payment. And the agent has to have the authority, which we need to be sure of from the consumer. They need to know is the agent authorized to spend? If I give it a budget of$100 and they want to spend$120, it needs to go back to the human for approval. But the future of agents is that might happen without the approval. And then that what is called a mandate has to be transferred to the to the to the merchant to be able to, okay, I accept this mandate, I'm gonna ship the shoes. Because conversely, here's a good question. What if the agent buys the wrong thing or makes a mistake, it's the wrong size, it's the wrong color? Who's responsible? And the consumer does a chargeback. That's transaction, that's payments infrastructure. So that's why it's it's yes and no. I agree with you. It's commerce versus transactions, but the transaction is integral to commerce.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I love the analogy or explanation. I think you're spot on. So, what does success look like for your company over the next, say, three to five years?
SPEAKER_01:Spreadly is a growth business. We've been doing this for 15, 20 years now, and we're still at what we feel is we're at the very beginning of this massive change in the payment space. Open payments as an idea where you have a single provider to provide the software for your entire payment stack is still a relatively new idea in the sense that you might have multiple providers behind Spreedly. And we're growing very nicely, our GMV is growing very nicely. We have Blue Chip logos signing up for Spreadly. And we'd have this belief that we're still at the very early innings of what could be a massive market. And this is the transformation of payments infrastructure being, okay, I'm gonna go to one vendor and get everything. You know, we saw that through the rise of mobile and the rise of brands like Stripe and Addion, great businesses, by the way, but just from a you know different different type of problem that they solved. To now, okay, the simplicity of doing a best of breed approach is there's a much higher degree of simplicity now instead of having to go and find five different vendors to solve this problem. And that's really the future for Spreadly is abstracting away the complexity of being multi-region, being best of breed in your payment stack, and reducing the risk, by the way, of maybe making the wrong vendor choice. Because no vendor is the best at everything.
SPEAKER_02:So I know we've probably answered this question, but I'm sure there are more trends out there. But what do you think are the biggest trends that are reshaping the payments industry right now?
SPEAKER_01:Some people hate it when I say this, but payments as a space is like the fastest moving oil tanker you've ever seen. It's this huge business. The TAM of payments is huge. It's one of the biggest markets in the world. And it's moving really fast. And that's actually one of the things personally I love about the space. There's so much happening all the time, but it also takes a really long time for innovation to kind of propagate through the system. Took us 20 years to roll out EMV chip cards in the US, you know? Yeah, I have to. How long do we talk about that for? Forever. But it's a great example of like it's super innovative, great technology, but it takes forever to roll out. And so, you know, there's this kind of view of like payments is super innovative, fast changing, which is true. There's always lots of headlines. But for it to actually make it out completely to the market, a new technology to make its way out to the market, really does take quite a while. That's what I mean by it's the fastest moving oil tanker you've ever seen. When you're running a company like Spreebly, that's an innovator in the space. You have to keep up with all the changes. You know, we just talked about the two new protocols from OpenAI and Google and all that. But how long does it take for the enterprise to adopt it? That might take a while. And so balancing the innovation, being a software innovator with being a successful, profitable company, that you've got to be a little bit realistic about how fast the enterprise is going to adopt some great new technology, not that it's bad, is one of the interesting things for Spoodley. Great example. You know, we just talked about agents and agents being the new front end of commerce. Merchants, e-commerce teams have built, spent lots of money building really powerful, optimized front ends. You know, if you go to Macy's.com, that's an e-commerce engine for Macy's. The front end is gonna go to, and I'm a Gemini user, less of a ChatGPT user, like it's going to Gemini and asking for something. Hey, maybe Macy's has that. That's the new front end. And that's some of the true disruption we're gonna see in the space, where the front end of commerce is now the LLM interface, and we as the infrastructure providers have to feed those versus call it the merchant's native, native website.
SPEAKER_02:So besides AI and agentic commerce, agentic payments, however you want to phrase it, the other big one that that I often hear about are stable coins. So just curious your thoughts on that.
SPEAKER_01:I think crypto is an amazing technology, but I also think it's a technology that has not reached wide adoption from a payments, e-commerce transaction perspective. And again, it's from an engineering technology perspective, it is actually really, really cool stuff. But you don't really see a ton of adoption from the consumer market. The credit card is still king. Now, APMs and LPMs are are actually growing massively, even here in the US. But crypto is a distant fifth or sixth or seventh. It's not even third or fourth. And so I think there's a lot of really exciting hype, and there's a lot of great stuff that's happening in the space, don't get me wrong. But it is one of those topics, and maybe it's going to be like EMV, where in 20 years it's actually the number one, but it's going to take another 10, 15 years. I think that's the unfortunate truth for that pro for that technology.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. A couple of final questions. So if you could go back and give yourself advice at the start of your career, what would that be?
SPEAKER_01:I would say it's believe in your convictions and stick with your convictions. When you're young and you're starting and you're learning, you're really just learning and you're in it to learn and try new things and do new things and fail and pick yourself up and try again. But sometimes you're right and you let somebody else lead you down the wrong road. And when you're young and you had don't have a ton of experience, that's always that's always the balance of like when do I stick with what I think is right versus, hey, like I got my whole life ahead of me, I'm gonna try something different. And if it fails, it fails. You know, and so that balance is something that as you get older and more experienced, you get better at, right? And so understanding that balance and having advice to myself, you know, Peter 15 years ago, would definitely be something I would focus on. And I would say sometimes it's trust your gut. That's the other thing, is is as a leader, you often just kind of know something implicitly. You don't know why, but you do. And sometimes it's it's the right thing to just trust that intuition.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, I love that answer. So what's the one thing that payments leaders that are listening to this show today, what should they be thinking about right now?
SPEAKER_01:And I'll skip over Agenda Commerce because we've we've beat we flogged that one. Okay. Because that is the number one. Also, as just somebody who loves innovation and technology, I think it's just so cool what's happening. But I would say it's don't get wrapped up too much in the hype and remember that it took 20 years to roll out EMV. And it's great innovation is really important. And I believe in software. If you're not innovating, you're dead, simply put. It's just a question of when. And in payments, it's the fastest moving oil tanker you ever saw. And sometimes change takes longer than you think.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, so anything that you want to leave the audience related to Spreadly, what would you want them to remember from this podcast about the company?
SPEAKER_01:Spreadly is always innovating. We are at the very beginning of this wave of mass adoption of this idea that best of breed is no longer complicated to implement. It's about abstracting the way, abstracting away the complexity of operating in multiple regions across multiple maybe business lines in the same region, maybe a medium risk and a low-risk business. And all of these things now can be had from a single provider. And we are the go-to brand, or we are the leader for companies that are looking to build their revenue or grow their revenue globally. That growth and that time to market is what we are great at.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, well, I think that's a great way to wrap up the show. So, Peter, thank you so much for being here today. I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate the time and for you being on the podcast today. Awesome. Well, thanks for having me, Greg. It was a good time. And to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well. And until the next story.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments Podcast. Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpayments.com, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes. If you enjoyed listening, please share on your social channels as well.