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Fast Checkout, everywhere
Given the magic of Fast Checkout, you’ll want to use it frequently, ideally every time you have to pay online.
We were initially planning on releasing Fast Checkout to a small cluster of large and similar merchants, ensuring a target group of consumers can use Fast Checkout on all of their favorite sites, and then quickly expand that network.
However, we are currently negotiating a number of potential distribution deals to exponentially speed up the rollout of Fast Checkout, which will allow much larger volumes of stores to adopt Fast Checkout from launch, globally.
The business model
When merchants offer Fast Checkout for processing payments, they will be charged a transaction fee.
Fast profits from the difference of the amount charged to the merchant, less the interchange and network fees incurred to process the transaction.
Our business model is clear, and at scale, this opportunity is huge, with a $3.5 trillion eCommerce market, in addition to other sectors we can easily service like media, offline, SAAS and others, our immediately addressable market represents hundreds of billions annually.
We also have long-term ambitions of solving additional friction points for consumers when interacting with businesses, especially in the repetitive sharing of siloed data.
As an example, you currently have to manually update your address with your bank, phone company, and everywhere else whenever you move.
Fast will eventually enable you to push that update to all your trusted contacts, in just 1-click.
For this service, we would charge the businesses who you expressly approve, a fee for that access, or for the data pushes.
We are very cautious of consumers being lulled into using other authentication or payment products very clearly using the data to feed conflicting and primary business models, not in the consumers’ interest; such as advertising, or to lock consumers into a particular platform/ecosystem.
Once we launch Fast Checkout, we will offer the fastest and easiest payments, whilst being completely independent and free of any conflicting business model.
Scalability and security
We continued testing this week, increased the testing 4x to 1,000,000 1-click transactions a minute at < 100ms. We are increasing our focus on this to ensure we can increase support 100x of that volume now, to comfortably cater to the largest spikes.
The team built the entire Fast Checkout stack on extremely low latency, and rapidly scalable infrastructure to support these volumes, will make for a good teardown blog at a later date, but our main focus is purely on ensuring a smooth launch with magical consumer experiences.
Protection against both downtime and data breaches are absolutely top of mind as key risks for any system facilitating managing authentication and payments, and one we take seriously.
Due to the PII required to facilitate checkout, Fast has invested and will continue to invest significant resources on protecting consumer data against bad actors.
After finalizing our internal testing, we will kick off our pre-launch security testing and will also be launching an ongoing bug bounty program to support our ongoing and proactive commitment to security.
Want free swag?
We will be picking the keys up for our new office tomorrow, we may open up later in the week for you to check it out, share some laughs or a drink.
We will even hand out some of our Fast sweaters and Fast swag to the folks who come along.
Keep an eye out on Twitter @domm, for more info later in the week!
Something Else…
Want to hear about something else that I didn’t cover here, let me know:
Key open roles
Technical hiring manager
Head of engineering
Senior product designer
Let’s talk
Domm Holland (Founder & CEO): @domm // domm@fast.co
Allison Barr Allen (COO): @abarrallen // allison@fast.co
Team: @fast // hi@fast.co // careers@fast.co