Unzer’s Revolution Robert Bueninck on Unified Commerce and the Future of Payments

Episode Overview

Robert Bueninck is a seasoned leader and innovator in the payments and commerce industry, currently serving as CEO of Unzer, a leading European fintech company. With over a decade of experience in the sector, Robert has played pivotal roles in driving organizational transformations. Before joining Unzer in 2021, he spent nearly a decade at Klarna, where he held key positions including Managing Director of the DACH and Benelux regions and Branch Manager for Klarna Bank in Germany. At Klarna, he was instrumental in expanding market share and positioning the company as a consumer brand powerhouse across Europe. Since stepping into the CEO role at Unzer, Robert has guided the company through significant growth, overseeing a strategic and organizational realignment that has positioned Unzer as a frontrunner in Europe’s payment solutions market. His tenure has been marked by a focus on innovation, particularly in unified commerce solutions that bridge the gap between online and offline customer experiences. 

Beyond his professional achievements, Robert’s leadership style emphasizes collaboration and adaptability, key traits that have helped him navigate the complexities of the fintech industry. He is passionate about empowering small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with cutting-edge tools that enable them to thrive in a competitive market.

Episode Transcript

Robert Bueninck: I think working from home is great if you know the task you’re doing and if you’ve done it before, and then you can be very concentrated and effective on it. But if you are new to a company and you’re trying to figure out how everything ticks and how everything works.

Kevin Rosenquist: Hey there, welcome to Pay Pod, where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is Kevin Rosenquist. Thanks for listening. Robert Bueninck is CEO of Unzer, a European fintech company offering modular payment and commerce solutions with a focus on small and medium sized enterprises. Robert is leading the company through a major expansion, shifting from a German payment processor to a European fintech powerhouse. We talk about its unified commerce platform, the popularity of buy now, pay later options, and also why Germany has been slow to adopt a cashless system. Joining me now from Berlin, Robert Browning. So omnichannel is a big buzzword.  Unser takes it a step further with what you refer to as unified commerce. So talk about the benefits of this unite unified commerce strategy and how it differs from your standard omnichannel approach.

Robert Bueninck: Yeah, it’s been a buzzword for a while. Before omnichannel, you had multi-channel,  but essentially,  essentially the difference between omnichannel and unified commerce is that with omnichannel, you’re able to get every single means where somebody wants to purchase an item from you from the same provider, and the data comes from a central database. But with unified commerce, the data is available in real time across the different channels. Meaning if you purchase something offline, you immediately are able to see that if you would like on your online channel.

Kevin Rosenquist: Okay.

Robert Bueninck: Real time example.  You’re in a shoe store. You purchased a shoe from the store. It’s changing your stock immediately online. It knows for online transactions that the stock is not there anymore. Or you’re able to get an iPad in the store to do an online transaction for a different size. And immediately that gets triggered to the cashier system that they can buy, pay for it.

Kevin Rosenquist: Okay. All right. So yeah, so very much real time. Everything’s very real time.

Robert Bueninck: Everything’s connected real time on all the different channels. Wow. That’s really the difference.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s awesome. I feel like as technology advances, like, I feel like we all have more and more apps and products we use, whether it’s business or in our personal lives or whatever. Are you seeing more and more merchants demanding an approach like this, where everything talks to each other just because they’re kind of getting used to that in different aspects of business and in their lives.

Robert Bueninck: I think that,  there’s some larger merchants that are that sit on their own platforms or own systems. They have built this capability,  and they provide these use cases to customers,  which means customers get more used to it.  and also smaller merchants with maybe smaller war chests in order to build these, these, these fun things, so to say, they also want to provide that service to the customers. Customers want it. Customers expect it more and more. And that’s really what you set out to do to enable these great experiences also for, for mid-sized  retailers,  and maybe even for, for butchers and restaurants if they would like to. So it’s, it’s really enabling these, these experiences that was before really exclusive to the ancient norms of this world.  to also be able to provide that interconnectivity between online and offline.

Kevin Rosenquist: Okay. Okay. And you, you guys have acquired a decent amount of companies over the years, and you’ve mentioned the need to harmonize the company’s offerings. How has this vision of unified commerce positioned against other European players in the payment space? And are there further innovations that you foresee in this direction?

Robert Bueninck: I think I think,  what we did is we really acquired, we really looked at what is a company that needs to provide the full ecosystem in order for retailer to really, really serve their customer end to end. What products should they require to have this full suite? And we have made some build decisions on each one of them. And,  even building is a lot of benefits. But,  in many cases it takes more time. So we really,  in some cases had to buy the capability,  and then connect it really with a modular approach to our central, a central platform which we decided to build and not buy. And  so that’s really in that light, you should really see all the different acquisitions that we did. I think now we have actually all the capabilities that we need to provide that full ecosystem. And from that base, you can build a lot of innovation on top. You can imagine that if you have the data together in one data lake of all these different streams where you might want to interact with that, that customer, you have that available in real time, that you can build a lot of funky capabilities for, for merchants to really, really, really provide you great things to their to their customers on top of that. So,  we really built the base, I would say, and now we can build lots of interesting innovations on top.

Kevin Rosenquist: You mentioned, you know, bigger players build their own products and you guys are more towards the small and medium sized enterprises where people might want to outsource that. You know, technology is moving so fast, especially with AI and all this stuff that we talk about lots, a lot on this show. Do you find that more companies might just say, you know what, I’m going to outsource this. I’m going to buy this rather than try to build it myself, because that way I don’t have to worry about keeping up with the changes.

Robert Bueninck: Yes and no. I think you see both. It really depends often on the DNA of the company. But having been in payments for so many years, it’s quite interesting how much your competitors are. Also your,  your partners. And you see that a lot, right. That people cooperate at one point, but at the same time they’re competing in another field and at the same time they’re actually partnering with a competitor. But depending on the product, it’s sort of becoming really, really intertwined with each other, where everybody just uses part of each other’s capabilities. And that’s quite interesting, I think. But when it comes from a merger perspective, you still have merchants that want to do everything themselves. They’re still merchants that are trying to become a PCP or acquire themselves. So you see a lot of that happening. At the same time, there’s a lot of companies that, for very good reasons, decide to stay as nimble and lean as possible and try and just find the best partners for everything else. So you see, you see different trends in Germany, specifically companies. And this has been, I think, quite in the DNA here,  they are trying to build things themselves a lot.

Kevin Rosenquist: Why do you think that that is? You said it’s in the DNA. What do you mean by that?

Robert Bueninck: Something that’s quite striking here. I think a lot of players here look at the example of Rocket Internet and how they build businesses. And then you see the likes of Zalando. They’ve often built things in-house quite early on. And then sometimes these businesses can stand alone and were sold as well. Right. So people are trying to build everything in-house to at one point sell the compartments externally. Okay. Well they look at it in a longer trajectory. And many, many businesses here look at that. And you see them wanting to follow that, that same route.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s an interesting point of a pro for doing it yourself is if you did want to sell the business or sell pieces of the business, at some point you would have it, you own it, it’s yours, and you can sell that as part of the business.

Robert Bueninck: But it’s funny, right? Because you can’t be good at everything.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. Yeah. You’re right. You’re 100% right. Yeah. I feel like I would lean more towards, hey, I’m going to outsource this to the people who know what they’re doing and who are experts, you know, so that I don’t have to. I can just focus on what I’m good at, you know? But that’s just me.

Robert Bueninck: Yeah, exactly. But it’s, um. Like I said, it’s been in the culture, in the DNA that it happens less here. So for example, I worked many years in the buy now, pay later space and,  it’s, it’s the number one payment method in Germany also traditionally and  a lot of the larger retailers, they do this in-house and worked many years for client. And we always had cases with these, these, these retailers saying like, listen, outsource this.  Let us do it for you. We can do it cheaper. We can do it better. We can give better experiences because this is what we have always done. But they were always convinced that nobody could do it better than them. And they know their customers best. Their customers are unique and their customers are unique to them. And then we would come with data saying, your customers are unique to you, but they also shop at other places, right? They don’t only shop up at you, right? So we had those very interesting discussions,  going into that. And then sometimes you manage to convince him to do open book and to really, really, really look into all the costs they would have and all the different things and how they define acceptance rates and how much you would go to the really, really nitty nitty gritty detail. And then always,  they would come out and say, okay, you’re right.

Kevin Rosenquist: All right. You’re right.

Robert Bueninck: But  but, but try to get them to get that far. That was the tough one.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, you it’s a good segue. You brought up the buy now, pay later thing. Unzer has a kind of a different approach to the buy now, pay later product. You talk about how it’s designed to keep customer relationships entirely in the hands of merchants. So there’s no cross selling of data. Can you explain why you believe that approach benefits both merchants and customers?

Robert Bueninck: So, I mean, there’s a trend, of course, in buy now, pay later. Where buy now, pay later payment methods have become very heavily branded and they want to give consumers a full experience, a full purchasing experience, right? So,  after the transaction, an app geared towards giving them stores and offers geared towards,  starting a purchase experience from the app. You see this with After pay, you see this with Klara, of course. And  if you are a retailer that has a lot of attention to their brand value and their experience of their customers a little bit to the point I made before, right? Our customers are unique.  what essentially happens is you give your customer experience away to a third party,  inherently in a buy now, pay later transaction. It’s not just one touchpoint, right? You don’t just do the transaction, you do the transaction, but later on you need to actually pay for.

Kevin Rosenquist: That, right? Yeah yeah yeah yeah.

Robert Bueninck: Inherently that’s not that’s another touch point. Often it comes with more touch points because you might have a reminder. You might want to have a little friendly nudge.  you want to snooze it. There’s a lot of little touch points. Right. And all those touch points are then done with a different brand. And naturally, if you are in that ecosystem, they will try and upsell stores and offers to you, which might be from your competitor. So if you’re a Nike, you want to own that customer relationship, but then you might get nudged by an Adidas discount. That’s not what Nike wants. Now,  we aim a bit lower in the market than Nike and Adidas, but it’s a clear example, right? So I think at the back of that,  we provide a full white label offering, which means that the merchant can brand it whatever they want. They can buy Nike now, pay later. It can just be neutral. Wear now, pay later and they can control what every touchpoint looks like, what the branding is on, the touchpoint. What is the tonality?  Is it a more colloquial tonality or a more formal tonality? All that can really be designed as the merchant wants it.  and in a market like,  like where we are big in Germany, but also Austria, Switzerland,  buy now, pay later is the most famous favorite payment method. And,  if you are a merchant and 70% of your transactions go through that external provider that basically takes the customer journey away,  you give away some ownership, right? So we provide the service so that merchants can actually keep that ownership the entire entire journey as opposed to some of the others. 

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. That’s interesting. Like so, so no one you know the customer will never know that they’re not dealing directly with the merchant. Is that kind of accurate?

Robert Bueninck: Also, that is exchangeable. What we usually recommend is that the further you go into the journey. So if you at one point you need to pay. So if you have not paid, after a few reminders, the experience can become a little bit less pleasant, right? Because,  it’s a negative experience. And that’s when rebranding can change over and much towards Windsor because at that point,  the merchant might not want to be related to a late fee.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s a good point. That’s a really good point. So then you have then the, the, the big guns have to come in the, the, the, the heavy the heavy party has to come in and, and take care of it. So and I guess that’s a good thing too though, because then that needs to be.

Robert Bueninck: Done in a, in a friendly tone.

Kevin Rosenquist: And of course, of course,  but it’s not on the merchant at that point or it doesn’t feel like it’s coming from the merchant at that point.

Robert Bueninck: Exactly.

Kevin Rosenquist: Okay, okay. Yeah, that. I could see the benefit of that for sure. I want to talk about POS. Go. It’s your mobile cash register product so small businesses can offer cashless payment options. I was reading about how Germany has been slower to adopt cashless payments. Do you agree with that? And also, why do you think that is?

Robert Bueninck:  Well, it’s very easy to agree with that because you just need to look at the data. Right?  If you look at the surrounding countries around Germany, if you go to the north, less than 10% of transactions are still with cash. I go to Denmark a lot,  because I have a sizable business there. I can’t remember seeing what the Danish crown looks like. Everything’s cashless.  but also the Netherlands. Belgium right. It’s. That’s all. All with cards.  Barely any cash. But in Germany, it’s still 50%. Wow. In Germany, you can go to restaurants and they don’t accept cards.  Try and take a taxi in Frankfurt, the center of Europe where the European Central. Brexit. Right. The taxi driver will say no, you can’t pay with a card. And so cash is still very, very, very much ingrained in Germany. It is changing and Covid has helped with changing it because yeah the handling of cash was life threatening at one point. Yeah. Yeah. Life threatening.  so it is changing.  you can see that also the data, but it’s still significant, right? So that’s a shift that Germany will still make.  It will happen. We just need to take bets on how quick it will happen, but,  it’s definitely a shift that’s happening.

Kevin Rosenquist: Is POS Go kind of a unique product? Are there a lot of other offerings in Germany, or is it more about the availability or more about the adoption, I guess.

Robert Bueninck: So what POS go God does is it provides a full Android terminal with all payment capabilities that you might want, but at the same time is a cashier software system. So it has everything in one small device. So it allows you to do simple table management. It allows you to do stock management. It does your bookkeeping. It allows you to connect to data, which is the main accounting system in Germany.  through API. It basically allows you to run your store from one device. And that’s really unique in Germany because essentially,  in Germany, still a lot of stores work with an old fashioned stupid terminal,  as we would call it, and a hardware device which manages their store and does their cashier software. And we combine both in one small device. So if you’re, of course, a store with,  with multiple devices. This is not for you, but if you are a small retailer, then you can basically run your whole store for one device. Not just cheaper, it’s more convenient. And basically, yeah, it helps you with about a billion things. There are some devices in the market, mostly coming from providers from outside that provide  simple cashier software with the device as well. But what we have in terms of software capabilities goes way deeper.  so it just gives you a lot more functionality. So with that, it’s really unique.

Kevin Rosenquist: Someone who’s managed small businesses before being able to accept multiple payment options is sort of essential, at least in my experience. You know, there are SMEs in Germany really starting to embrace it. Are they starting to embrace POS go? Is it kind of opening some doors for them too?

Robert Bueninck: Yes. I mean you don’t need POS to accept multiple payment options just to make that clear. Right. But the additional payment options that it does allow is buy now, pay later. And so back to where we started. Right. We can provide a full buy now pay later experience also from that device because it’s Android based. And so that’s really a unique additional option that we can offer there. But yeah we see lots of pickup with smaller retailers with food trucks.  and we see a lot of success weirdly, with one one time events. So for example, we have helped a lot of Christmas markets. So last Christmas where Christmas market is really the use case right there. There’s a lot of traffic. There’s a lot of movement, but in a short time frame. And these are of course short small small retailers,  that, that really can use this, this, this wide from the box. Right. They can’t carry around big hardware,  stuff, etc..

Kevin Rosenquist:  nor do they want to carry a ton of cash, right.

Robert Bueninck: Or carry a ton of cash. Yeah.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah.

Robert Bueninck: Also, we’ve seen a lot of,  we had a lot of fun,  with the Paralympics, where,  where, where we use our postcode devices,  to handle transactions.  so we we we also, I think it’s also quite unique in the market. We also started to, to enable this just on a rental basis. So you have an event,  you have a pop up store. You can actually use this just for a short time frame rather than having to sign a five year contract.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, that’s that kind of stuff for sure. The pop ups in the events, it’s you know, I’ve worked those too. And yeah, without those kinds of capabilities, it’s just, I don’t know, no one wants to sit there and make change anymore. It’s just difficult and you got to have enough change and all that. So yeah, that’s definitely a very good use case for that.  switching gears just a little bit, I noticed that you moved to Berlin in 2022. Is that correct?  How impactful has that move been in attracting top talent? Has it? Has it helped you in bringing on good people?

Robert Bueninck: Yes. For sure. I mean, we had a so in essence, we were a merger company, right? That’s why we have we have offices in eight different locations. And  as, as this being a young company, we we felt like we needed a fresh start. We needed to, to really pick one of the locations of being and being our HQ being,  the name and in the second chair. And Berlin is a great place for that naturally, because it’s a great hub for tech talent. And it’s,  it’s just a great, great place to be. So we decided on Berlin.  we had already an office here.  mainly we were kind of using the office of one of the companies that joined under,  called hub, which is the provider for the for the software. And,  we moved to a bigger office and,  and we moved here, and I think especially for devs, but also for for generally tech talent. It’s a great place to be, right?  My previous life we also opened when I was there. We opened the sort of second HQ in Berlin,  for the exact same reason. 

Kevin Rosenquist: You guys, are you guys,  work from home? Are you in the office? Are you hybrid? What is your setup?

Robert Bueninck: Um. We’re hybrid. I am in the office. I love to be in the office, but I’m also. I also know that those five days in office are over. Right? So we have a 40% policy. So two days in office.  Three days not. And we have,  we have team days where everybody will be together and then one day is more, more flexible.

Kevin Rosenquist: Okay.

Robert Bueninck:  so we see more and more people coming back to the office, which we encourage. But yeah, we will also give the freedom to,  to be able to work from home and, and take the best out of both. So to say.

Kevin Rosenquist: I’m, I’m, I’m kind of sensing that your personal opinion is you would rather be an in-office company. Is that what. Is that fair to say?

Robert Bueninck: An in-office company? Not so much. But I do believe that if you work that the vibe you have when different people work together close to each other, it’s really about the conversations that you have outside of calls, right? If you need to go to the office to sit in a zoom call all day, then there’s very little purpose. But it’s the conversations you have by the coffee machine. It’s overhearing the conversations that your colleagues from different departments have. Is it the interaction that you have when you have a beer after work? I think that’s really where education, training,  development comes from up to a very large extent, but also where innovation happens. Right. Trying to have a creative brainstorming session,  from people on the zoom call in different locations. It’s much tougher than if you’re in a room together. Agreed.

Kevin Rosenquist: I totally agree.

Robert Bueninck:  and I especially think working from home is great if you know the task you’re doing and if you’ve done it before, and then you can be very concentrated and effective on it. But if you are new to a company and you’re trying to figure out how everything ticks and how everything works and who to talk to about that issue, that really learning how other departments work and how it’s all connected, that really comes from from talking to these people and meeting them and hearing what they’re doing. And that’s much tougher if you work from home.  So there I see, I see a bit of a gap when people are all fully working and working from home. Yeah. And I love the vibe of seeing everyone on the floor and making jokes and,  and,  and building friendships, right. And that’s just why I personally like to be in the office. But,  I understand that the five day days are also somewhat over.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re right. I mean, you can’t duplicate, you can’t replicate that in person,  camaraderie or vibe, as you said. Like, it’s just it’s just different when you’re on zoom. Even this call right now, if you were sitting in here and we were doing this podcast together, it would just be different. The flow would be different than it is on zoom. It’s just how it is. So I totally understand what you mean, especially when you’re trying to run a business with a lot of different departments and a lot of different people. It’s good to have them together.

Robert Bueninck: And we are, like I said before, right? We are a merger company, so we have different teams coming together that represent different products. Right. And why we’re combining the products. You also need to combine the teams. You need to combine the cultures. You need to combine ways of working, understanding what the other products do and how best to connect them, and what type of experience you want to give when they’re connected. Right. And all these things.  Yeah. That’s why we do organize kinds of things to try and get people together for exactly that. Right? If you know somebody, the line even for doing a quick digital call is much quicker. If you know what you’re talking to and you know, you can just ask them little things.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s a really good point, too. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Robert Bueninck,  the company is under. Thanks so much for joining me. I really appreciate your time.

Robert Bueninck: No worries. Great to have you. Great to be here.