 Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Commerce Tools Elevate, coming at you from beautiful sunny Miami Beach, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host and analyst, Shelly Kramer. Shelly, both of us are just fresh from the main stage where we heard a lot of Commerce Tools executives as well as executives from other companies talk about what's going to be happening here at Elevate over the next couple of days. And one of the things we kept hearing about is trust and how important that is for the e-commerce shopping experience. Absolutely, absolutely. And so it was great to hear such a focus during the keynote conversations about delivering on trust and transparency and data privacy and protection and kind of keeping all that front and center from a customer experience. So, exactly what I'm looking to hear. Well, who better to talk about that than Frank Keller? He is the EVP general manager, large enterprise and merchant platforms group at PayPal. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Frank. Thank you. You were up on that stage just now. So you did a great job. Commerce Tools today announced an expanded partnership with PayPal, providing users with access to Fastlane. Can you tell our viewers a little bit about what Fastlane is? Yeah, sure. I mean, we have a partnership with Commerce Tools on our payments platforms, like Rain Tree and PayPal Complete payments. And when PayPal is known for our branded checkout, so the button that everybody knows, and we know that a lot of customers go through a guest checkout flow, meaning they're not using our wallet or other wallets. So it's a very cumbersome process because when you check out as a guest, you got to fill in your name, you got to fill in your payment details, you got to fill in your address, phone number. And when you look at the conversion stat of that process, it's about 50% of all customers just abandon that process. And this is for a company very expensive because imagine you spend all that marketing dollars to get the customer even top of your funnel, then they found the right product, they put everything in the car, they're ready to pay, and now they abandon it. So very, very expensive to have abandonment at that process and no conversion. And the idea of Fastlane is to take those customers that are not willing to register and make it a one-click payment. So how does that work? It basically works the first time on any merchant that participates in the Fastlane network that goes through a regular guest checkout. And by the end of that guest checkout, they see that they can save their information with Fastlane by Paypal. And I'll come to that by Paypal in a second. And the next time they come to either the same merchant or a different merchant that participates in the network, they go through a guest checkout. We recognize that customer and then all the information is prefilled. It's safe, they don't have to enter that information again. The data is stored very safely on our servers and we keep that privacy in mind. So why is it by Paypal important? There are a couple of options out there to do that. But what we've recognized is that consumers trust Paypal. They trust Paypal with their data. We've been around for a long time. We're one of the most trusted brands, actually. One of the most trusted brands where people believe that they can store their information safely with us, their most critical financial information. We're not sharing that information otherwise. So when they see, oh, it's not the Paypal checkout button because they don't want to use it, but it's by Paypal. They still trust us with their data. And so people opt into this really seamless experience. And that's what we've announced with Commerce Tools to do that guest checkout, fast guest check out. I feel like that was created specifically for me. And thank you. Thank you for that. I am a guest checkout expert and all of these things that you touched on, and some of it is, some of the reasons that you opt for guest checkout is that you want it to be fast. And sometimes the process of logging in or whatever, and I just want to buy and run. And so this truly is functionality. And I am the person who has abandoned during the purchase and it's just like, oh, it's so clunky and I just get irritated. And if you don't care enough to make this process a seamless one, I don't need that pair of shoes after all. But I mean, so it really is an important piece of functionality and very excited to hear that. But it's good and terrible because I really don't need to expand my e-commerce expertise any further than it already is. Sorry, I can't be accountable for that. Worry stung. But I want to remove friction for you. Yeah, no, that's my job. It's really great. And I think that you hit on so many things. It's like, and Rebecca and I talked about this and I hate to buy into a stereotype because we're women and the reality of it is in many households, women are the primary consumers. So I'm not just buying shoes from myself. You know, I'm buying from my family and I am an expert at e-commerce experiences and I have really high expectations for those to be pleasant experiences and efficient experiences. So hearing about steps that you're taking in partnership with Commerce Tools to make those experiences better, that makes perfect sense and we all win, right? I mean, customers win, vendors win, you sell more, we get the things we want in a seamless way, we all win. Yeah, the reason why we're partnering with Commerce Tools is because for any business who wants to implement the product, we want to remove that burden as much as possible. And the closer the partnership is with a platform like Commerce Tools, the lower the integration effort is. And that's why we've blocked this on top of our PSP platforms and that's what we're rolling out. One of the things we heard on the main stage is this idea of innovating with the customer in mind. Customer-centric approach to creativity and making sure that it is, delivering on what the customer wants and needs at where they are in their shopping journeys. How do you do that? I mean, I'm curious, do you have focus groups? What are the kinds of ingredients that you need to make sure you are, in fact, delivering on that promise? I mean, there are multiple ways. One is we have 35 million merchants out there, 400 million consumers, we get a lot of inbound. And when I talk and our teams talk to our customers, new ideas actually come up. There's also industry trends, right? The idea of improving guest checkout is not a new one. And then say like, okay, how can we bring our assets together with that idea? And how can we make this even better? And the notion of, we know almost every, like we've seen, if you think about brain tree powering, all these big platforms, we've seen almost every consumer in the Western world. Right. So then the idea was, if we've seen them already, they're all using guests or branded, how can we leverage that to the next thing? And so that's when innovation starts, but that's the idea. And how you need to really work with customers and start implementing it, because you're stumbling across things where you're like, oh, I didn't expect that to happen. Why are customers suddenly churning off here? For instance, when we did Fastlane, we experimented with a name, because one of the big things that we knew there, that even non-paypal customers trust PayPal, as I said. But if the association is too strong to get confused, I'm not checking out now with PayPal or what? And so we've experimented with the naming a lot to figure out what is the right trade-off to convey the security and safety aspect and trust aspect while not confusing. And that's where you got to just experiment and run your experiments, and you need customers and partners like Commerce Tools to work with to do this every day. And we're innovating as we're launching, we're constantly refining. It's a basis point by basis point improvement because that's a big dollars in the end for our customers. What are some of the other trends you're seeing in the checkout experience? I think removing friction to drive conversion. Checkout has been a little bit an afterthought, but now it's, as I said, there's a big ROI, if you haven't banned a minute at that stage. And then the question, so the other thing that I'm seeing is the choice has proliferated. There's so much choice, especially when you're an international retailer and you want to offer all kinds of payment methods. It looks like the NASCAR of payment methods, right? And having the right choice, sending the signal to the consumer, I have right now what you need. I'll give you an example. You'll do a big item purchase. You probably want to finance it. So monthly installments of paying four in the US, paying three in France, that's what you want to see. If you buy a chewing gum, you probably don't want to finance it, right? So it's a very simple one. It's very easy. It's a purchase price that makes that choice. But you don't want to show things that are not relevant. Yeah, also, if I know you prefer to pay with a credit card and you prefer to pay with a debit card, I'd probably show that on top, right? Or other payment methods. So I think making the checkout much smarter and show personalized for the consumer what is relevant. So what's the trade-off of that is we don't want to scare consumers. Because everyone's like, how do you know that? So that's the delicate. If we think about in the age of AI, consumers actually want personalization. Consumers want that smartness, but they don't want to get scared. And this is where we're pivoting to how do we transform the PayPal trusted brand where people trusted us with financial information now into the age of data and AI, where people trust us with their data. And the same promises, we're not sharing that freely and you have to control and transparency what is used and how is it used. That's kind of the philosophy behind it. Now we got to work with customers together to figure it out how it works. It's all new for us, super exciting. Well, I think when you add on top of that the recommendation engine capabilities, I mean, you know what my shopping habits are across the board, right? And so I think that, you know, I loved, you talked about the smart receipts and, you know, who knew in those emails, those receipt emails that they have such a high 45% open rate? Yes. And so being able to use those emails to put offers that actually speak to me and save me time, like that's pretty brilliant. I think that's great functionality. Yeah, we had these transaction emails for years and we have to send them, right? And when we looked at the stand, we're like, wow, 45% of people open these things. So then we thought, what else can we do with it? I mean, it's, you have eyeballs, as we say. And now, if I give a retailer the option to put in a product recommendation here, an offer to do the next sale, right? Drive volume back to them, show package tracking information, something we're integrating right now with commerce tools to that the consumer actually can see where the package is. So the deliveries out there, there's less calls. We also have benefits for the retailer with complaints and some because we exchange more data. And coming back to the partnership with commerce tools, the better with those platforms, the data exchange happens in a transparent way. The more you can remove friction, the more you can keep the merchant, the retailer, but also the consumer safe. I want to go back to this idea about PayPal being so trusted in the market. It's not only a recognizable brand, but customers know they can rely on it that you'll keep their data safe. But you'll do what's right. You're a PayPal veteran. You've been around the company for a long time. I'd love to quiz you a little bit about the culture at PayPal and how you live those values on a day to day basis at work and how that extends to your brand. Yeah. I mean, if you think about the core value is that we keep customers safe. That's how we started. When we started, the core problem we tried to solve was, okay, you have these online shops now, how do you pay there? And especially in a world where in the physical world, people were used to the physical world, okay, I know I give you money, you give me the stuff. But here is, I don't know that merchant, right? And remember, this was 25 years ago. People didn't know how to pay. So we solved that by protecting the customer's financial information and only tokenizing actually that transaction. That's how we started. And so keeping that data, cybersecurity is a big one for us, keeping data safe, making sure there's no data breaches and so on and sharing non-personal information with those parties out there and still facilitating that transaction. So that was what we've been doing for many years. Now, commerce has moved on. And now this new age of AI, I think requires a rethinking of this. And we have a lot of debate internally about how do we transform, how do we keep customers along and still stay true to that brand promise? And when we innovate around those products, there's the debate about, I want to enable this friction-free experience. Oh, no, you can't do this because you cannot do it in this way. And so the most time we spend actually in the triangle of removing friction, being absolutely compliant with all the regulations and staying true to that brand promise. And that triangle is very intense. And we have the most debates internally about that. No, I'm picturing that Venn diagram of just how you are. Okay, how do we find that sweet spot? And that's a hard one. When you solve hard problems, you create value. Yeah, oh, that's brilliant. When you solve hard problems with the customer and the center of everything, I mean, that really is what makes a trusted breed, right? Correct. So you are here at Commerce Tools Elevate. I'm curious what you're hoping to get out of this conference, what ideas you're seeing already. And commerce is really just getting going. But what you're most excited about being here? Yeah, when Dirk and I started talking about the partnership and the extended partnership, already, as I said, within partnering on our payments platform was, how can the idea of an open commerce platform, how can we take that to the next level? What can we do together? How can we enable faster innovation? And that's really the starting point here. We've been doing branded checkout, we've been doing payment platforms. How do we evolve in this age of AI and partner really on new innovations? That's kind of talking here to customers and partners is what I'm getting out of this. You asked me about how do we innovate? It's through these conversations. Excellent. Well, Frank, this has been a pleasure having you on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. Good conversation. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm Rebecca Knight for Shelly Kramer. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's coverage of Commerce Tools Elevate. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news.