"At a certain scale, payment isn't a cost factor anymore. It becomes a strategic capability."
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In this episode, I speak with Christin Burmeister, Head of Product at Otto Payments. Otto is Germany's second-largest e-commerce marketplace with €7 billion GMV, 12 million active customers, and 6,000+ merchants. They started 70 years ago as a catalogue company and successfully transformed into a digital marketplace, building their own 250-person regulated payments entity to run it.
Before joining Otto, Christin spent 11 years at Zalando Payments, where she helped build their payments unit from the ground up. When we talk about large retailers building in-house fintech units, she has done it twice.
Key Takeaways:
- Why Otto decided to build payments in-house rather than use third-party providers
- How invoice and instalment payments shape customer behaviour
- Managing merchant fraud risk on a marketplace
- Otto's move into embedded lending with Banxware
- What it really takes to maintain a BaFin license