Formerly Head of Google Wallet, Osama Bedier recounts his fascinating journey building much of the modern payments world — and the concept of "relevant ubiquity" that came out of it.
Osama is the founder and CEO of Poynt and the former Head of Google Wallet. He played pivotal roles at AT&T Wireless, eBay, and PayPal, spent 10 years at PayPal across 14 different roles, and later served as President of GoDaddy Commerce.
Carol is Yuno's Chief Business Officer and the host of Payments Unpacked. She brings two decades of experience from Google, where she worked on contactless payments, and from across the global fintech ecosystem.
People have tunnel vision when it comes to payments. They didn't go somewhere thinking, I'm going to go pay with PayPal today. They were shopping. In the back of their mind, they had decided they're going to use their Visa card that they use online or that they're going to use their MasterCard. And that tunnel vision prevented PayPal from being a part of that conversation. And so we came up with this term called relevant ubiquity. You need to be available enough so people think of you like Visa and MasterCard. They don't have to wonder. If they have to wonder whether you're available or not, you've already lost. At PayPal, I remember people telling us we're a payments company. We didn't even think we were payments. Like, as far as we're concerned, we were removing friction. A much better opportunity to make commerce easier, to bring people online, to allow them to transact. And every time we removed friction, we saw the numbers explode. Integrating into a bank was a nightmare. Integrating into any of the existing gateways was a nightmare. How do you make this so simple? How do you make it so that you can do it in one day? Average integration took a month or two and into a bank took a year. So we said, can we do that integration in a day, consistently?
Hello everyone and welcome to Payments Unpacked, where we explore stories, strategies, and big ideas shaping the payments industry. I'm Carol Grunberg. I'm the host and the Chief Business Officer at Yuno. Yuno is a global payments infrastructure platform where we make it easy for businesses all over the world to do payments and manage their commerce. Today, I'm incredibly thrilled to introduce a close friend of mine and a true payments visionary and icon, who shaped how the world pays and how the world does commerce and gets paid across all four hemispheres. Osama Bedier. Welcome Osama.
Wow, that's very kind. Thank you, Carol. I really appreciate it. I'm happy to be here.
I'm so happy to do this with you. This is amazing to see you.
Same, same.
So I want to do a little bit more on your background because you've touched on so many things and a lot of people know you, but there are still quite a few out there that might not. You've done so many things in the payment space, including president of GoDaddy Commerce. You were the founder and CEO of Poynt, played pivotal roles in the early days of PayPal and you helped to spin it off from eBay. My personal connection with you goes back to our days at Google where we first met. And you were the vice president of Google Wallet and Payments. So welcome to the podcast. I'm thrilled that you're here.
Yep. Thank you. Thank you. Honestly, it's weird that I look back and it feels like multiple lives. I've had a lot of opportunities. I feel very lucky. Very lucky.
So let's get into that a little bit. You have had such a fascinating journey. And I think it started back, not even in the US, right? Can we even go into the early days?
It's very true. I was born in Cairo, Egypt and came to the US at the age of eight. My dad came here to do a PhD. I fell in love with computing and coding shortly after. Started playing around. I remember the Vic 20 — a gaming device that somebody showed me you could hack into and start coding. I fell in love with it. From that point on, it set me on a journey of figuring out how to wield tech. My dad finished his PhD and went back. I begged him to let me stay and finish high school, which he ended up doing. During high school, I got access to an internet account. This is before the web. And I was just blown away by all the things the internet can do. While trying to go to school and pay for school here in the US, I found a company called LA Cellular, which later became part of AT&T Wireless. I took a call center job there. People called in with their phone problems. I had to solve them. There were eight binders on my desk. It felt very laborious to go through these eight binders to answer every question. So I emailed the person at the bottom of one of the documents — do you have this in digital form? And he emailed it back. I built a web server and a search engine and made it searchable just so I could do my calls better. All my neighbors around me started looking at what I'm doing — hey, can I borrow that? It looks very cool. My supervisor found out, and he came over and told me I can't use unauthorized software on my computer, and that I'm fired. My last day, the VP of the call center calls me in his office and says, I looked at your numbers and they're just phenomenal. My numbers were like twice as good as everybody else. I noticed that you're being fired for unauthorized software, but I can't ignore these numbers. What do you do? I told him about my software and he gave me a full-time job. He asked me, what do I want to call myself? I immediately said Webmaster — at the time, if you were around that early, it was like a very cool title. He said, done. He also said, you have three head count. I was 23 at the time, and I didn't know what to do with three headcount. So hire more people like you and do more of it. And so we built a call center technology group.
So you just saw opportunities to improve?
I learned a very important lesson that serves me even today: because I was a call center person, because I did the job for about three or four months, I pretty much knew the end user. I didn't need a spec to tell me what they needed. I didn't need a spec to tell me what the problems were. I understood it deeply and the ability to understand it and then just start coding was very powerful. It cut out so much of the back and forth and so much of the bad product development. In fact, the two headcount that I had, I made them do three months of calls before I let them code. They were very shocked. They ended up understanding the service really, really well from taking calls and talking to customers every day. You end up doing about 100 calls a day. So you're talking to 100 customers a day for three months. You end up understanding not just what they need, but what the business is doing well and what they're not doing well. I also learned a few lessons in corporate politics — my supervisor wanting to fire me for doing something that ultimately ended up being on every call center agent's desktop at AT&T Wireless. The engineering group, the IT group, was very unhappy that the call center decided to build stuff. That battle led to me having to move to IT. Inside of IT, people were telling me, why are you working so hard? What do you got to prove? Are you just here to make us look bad? Calm down a little bit. To me, that was just weird. I felt immediately out of place.
But then how do we go from that? The notion of really focusing on the problem, understanding it, this notion that everyone talks about now — customer centricity and customer first. So this is kind of what you're describing before it became a buzzword, right?
Yeah, well, I feel like I experienced it firsthand and nobody had to tell me. I felt it firsthand. And that's why I feel very lucky to have gone through that. I have a visceral connection to it. My salary went from like 13K to like 100K within the span of 12 months. To me, these guys were giving me — I couldn't believe that this was real. I still didn't feel like a job. They were trying to make me happy, but I was super unhappy because in fact I was happier when I was the guy taking calls and building the software on the side. It felt like more of a hobby and fun. And that's why when a friend called me in 1998, and said, hey, we're building an e-commerce group. E-commerce back then was probably 10 companies total really doing e-commerce across the world. Gateway happened to be one because they started off as a catalog. The way they tried to solve it was they gave you a form that you could pick parts and then that would generate an email which would go to a person that calls you back. What they wanted to do was actually end to end — allow the consumer to build the computer themselves, like build the specification and then send that directly to the factory. So I jumped at the chance because at this point I was just doing a lot of internal web applications. I didn't know anything about e-commerce.
Wow.
And Gateway ended up building one of their best, most talented groups of folks just totally by accident because the customers were the right customers and the demand was there and the problem was a massive problem. In fact, the tech didn't really exist to build it. I ended up at Gateway running a pretty large e-commerce group. While buying PCs online commoditized very quickly, there was a war between Gateway and Dell and nobody was making money on building PCs. I think that created a lot of the early lesson of e-commerce. In fact, a lot of those folks ended up at eBay.
So what was that journey and how prevalent was the commerce part of that process?
That was very present. eBay at the time was founded by Pierre Omidyar and Pierre had also found his way to an enormous amount of demand. I think it was the equivalent of online swap meet. So nobody knew it would get this big, but it was at least five to 10 percent of e-commerce at the time. It was his original code that was still running it, code that he wrote himself. A lot of similar paradigms were emerging that we had seen at Gateway — the tech was not keeping up. The demand was so enormous that you couldn't use off-the-shelf software. You couldn't use even databases. Today, we take a lot of things for granted. Back then, Oracle couldn't keep up. IBM couldn't keep up. Sun couldn't keep up with the level of demand.
We're like in the 2000s now, right? Early?
Yeah, this is early 2000s and eBay was doing millions of auctions a day. It was just fascinating and printing money. eBay was profitable from day one. A lot of their payments came in envelopes — people paid them literally cash in envelopes. Just keeping the site up, keeping up with demand was a massive task, let alone expanding. It started out as category by category — Pez dispensers was a big thing. Beanie Babies, if you remember, those were a big thing. Each category created enormous demand. Motors became at some point one of the biggest parts of eBay. We were just trying to keep up, let alone expand. They were rewriting basically the applications. They were hiring like crazy. While at eBay, I found this tiny company that was just — it seemed like everywhere we went, they were too. I was just fascinated because it was a really small company. Everybody you met there would just blow you away. Every conversation was amazing. I decided that I got to be a part of this. So I talked to everybody I could to get over to the PayPal group. It was a tiny group. It was hard to call it a company, even though their impact was enormous. So I made my way to PayPal. First as a project manager — it's the only way I could get in, which is also an important lesson. It reminds me of the Sheryl Sandberg quote — if you have the opportunity to join a rocket ship, don't ask which seat. Just take whatever you can. I made my way to engineering and then engineering management. PayPal ended up being my longest career — I think I was there for 10 years. I felt like every year was 10 years of experience. When you're at a hyper-growth startup — it was like 26 or 27 engineers when I joined. By the time I left, it was like 4,000 engineers and 14,000 people. I held 13 or 14 different jobs. I moved buildings like 12 times, but it was all in one company. When I first joined, the goal was all eBay auctions should be PayPal. At the time, something like 30% of eBay auctions had PayPal on them. Shortly after that, I took on International. We had this goal of following eBay everywhere they were. eBay was in 60 or 70 countries and going to 100 over the next few years. People would tell us a hundred countries, are you nuts? You'll be happy with three countries in three years. But we just saw this massive demand. Most of these countries didn't have ACH-like systems. They didn't have card-like systems. They didn't have anything to connect. So we had to be the glue between these things. In many countries, the laws didn't even exist on the books to do commerce online or payments online. We had to operate illegally or just in the gray area and help these countries draft their laws and rules so that it could work.
Right. This kind of payment was so nascent in those days.
Yeah, it was nascent, but it was already obvious it was changing the world. At PayPal, I remember people telling us we're a payments company. We didn't even think we were payments. People now look back at PayPal and say, wow, you must be a payments expert. We didn't even know we were doing payments. As far as we're concerned — and this was another important lesson — we were removing friction. We saw something that should operate way better. Every time we removed friction, we saw the numbers explode. People would tell us, banks would tell us, hey, you're doing payments. And we would say, no, no, we're just making the experience better. Even words like issuing and acquiring were very foreign to us. We didn't look at ourselves that way. For us it was P2P — we're just moving money between two entities. It could be two friends or could be Walmart and Carol. The simplicity of a foundation that wasn't cluttered with the business definition of how it should work is what allowed us to scale and add so many use cases on top of it. I remember a few turning points at PayPal. The first one was in 2004, when we had an outage for about a week. It became very obvious we're not just a website anymore. We had hundreds of millions of dollars of people's money. Actually, I think it was about three billion at the time. People can't access their money — that's a different feeling. That was a weird experience. It brought home the importance of payments for me in a way that I knew that these transactions were important. I understood at that point, the number one job of payments is that it works every single time. You can't screw up. By extension, that means trust. If you lose people's trust, it's really, really, really hard to earn it back. It took us about a full week. It turned out to be something on the database side that we were just outpacing what was possible with that vendor. They had to do a rewrite of their database to support us.
Right.
The other really important turning point — PayPal was losing a lot around 2005, 2006. And that didn't really matter because eBay bankrolled. eBay was making a ton of money. It's expensive to build a payment system, super expensive — especially a system of scale. That's why you don't see a new network born every minute. You don't see a new Visa. You don't see a new PayPal. Someone holds on to your funds like a bank and moves money broadly in such a ubiquitous way — very hard because of this problem. It takes a lot of money to bankroll that. A lot of it goes to fraud because the first sign of a successful payment or commerce system is usually a lot of fraud. You have to weather that fraud to learn from it and then combat it later. eBay started slowing down in 2006. It went from a Wall Street darling in 2005 to a huge problem in 2006. That's when we knew that PayPal needed to find its own path. We couldn't rely on eBay. At that point, 97% of revenue came from eBay. So I was asked by Meg Whitman, who ran eBay at the time, to focus on merchant services. Internally, it was actually called "off eBay". We had an eBay business. We needed to grow this off eBay business. It existed, but much of it wasn't successful. eBay was a first success. Now, six, seven years later, eBay is slowing down to almost nothing — from 80%+ growth to 15% growth. We said, OK, we've got to figure out the rest of the web. Why are we so successful on eBay, but haven't figured out the rest of the web? This is where I took 17 of our engineers and built what we call merchant services or the off eBay business.
Right.
International became the big driver of growth. eBay cross border became a huge enabler for people to sell everywhere on the world. Small two-person shops could sell to 100 countries — a big part of what PayPal allowed. This off-eBay group ended up building the future PayPal, later called PayPal 2.0 — within three years it became larger than eBay. It was the majority of PayPal's volume off eBay.
Also, let me get this straight. So what eBay did in approximately eight years, the off-eBay side did in about three years. It's phenomenal.
Yeah. But because the demand, the web was just in a different place at that point. It was just blowing up. This idea of sending money between two people who didn't know how to exchange money was a fundamental problem. Even credit cards weren't popular that much. PayPal made credit cards usable in the early days. That's why credit card companies loved PayPal so much in the earliest days — because it made them usable. Entering a credit card number into a form, your billing address, and your shipping address, it feels like all friction. So we solved those problems. By the time our off-eBay business came around, credit cards were actually fairly popular. Most of e-commerce was being done on credit cards. So how do you beat a system that's already working? We decided that you can't. If you can't beat them, join them. We had our first enormous failure. We did this huge project. The product was take the same eBay button and make it available off eBay. It was a disaster. There wasn't a lot of success or a lot of demand. Obviously you can look back now and say, obviously there wasn't a credit card. All the small sellers, all the ones that couldn't get credit card processing came to us. We had all the bad actors. None of the big guys, no one that was doing volume, looked at us seriously. This is where I kind of removed the lines between product and engineering. We were becoming more like the big company approach — you guys do the research and come and tell us what to build. We didn't have time for all of that. We broke down the lines between product and engineering and marketing and said, we're just one team. Let's go figure this out. Instead of six to nine months, we went back to weekly releases. Every week, let's put out something and see what customers say about it. What we found were a couple of really interesting things. One, there's no demand for a payment button. Consumers and merchants didn't really want a payment button alone. So how do you get them to take a payment button? There was demand for credit card processing and we could use our volume to give that processing at a better rate than anybody else. That was the first huge insight. Second huge insight was integrating into a bank was a nightmare. Integrating into any of the existing gateways was a nightmare. Average integration into one of the nicer gateways took a month or two, and into a bank took a year. So we said, how can we do that integration in a day consistently? Third and most important, the application you had to fill out to get an account was just atrocious. It took you weeks just to be told that you were not approved and had to go to a different bank. So we said, let's make it instant. Let's assume you're approved and let you start coding, let you start processing. And then if you show us you're a bad actor, kick you off. And the fourth was — to get the amazing rate on payments, the rate that nobody else could offer you, the merchant had to integrate the button.
It was a great moat. That was a great moat.
Yeah. We had a massive number of consumers, tens of millions of consumers with balances are willing to pay. If the merchant wasn't going to integrate it, then it's useless. So giving you an amazing rate — like the equivalent of a point or two points less than the market — to integrate the button. And it took off like wildfire. We were not ready for how massive this became. People like Dell and Walmart and Southwest Airlines. Within six months we realized we have so much demand. This was also a lesson. How do you become ubiquitous? We were ubiquitous on eBay, but not on the web. We noticed this thing that even if we're available on a website and a PayPal consumer preferred PayPal — they told us they preferred PayPal — we did so many surveys. People thought if you're available, I would use you in a heartbeat. And we would go back to people saying we were available. You didn't use it. So this was happening so often. We realized there's a psychology to payments that wasn't obvious upfront. They would tell us, I didn't even see you. I didn't even realize you were there. We're like, it's a big yellow button. How could you miss our big yellow button? Honestly, I didn't even think. So we realized they had this tunnel vision. People have tunnel vision when it comes to payments. They didn't go somewhere thinking, I'm going to pay with PayPal today. They were shopping. Already in the back of their mind, they had decided they're going to use their Visa card or their MasterCard. That tunnel vision prevented PayPal from even being a part of that conversation. So even when we're available, they wouldn't think of us. And so we came up with this term called relevant ubiquity. You need to be available enough so people think of you like Visa and MasterCard. They don't have to wonder. If they have to wonder whether you're available or not, you've already lost. You're not relevant to the transaction. We learned that a couple of things. Until you get to about 30% of buying opportunities for that consumer, you're not even going to pop in their mind. Until you get to 60%, they're not going to use you every time you're available. And 30%, 60% from that buyer's perspective — all the places they buy.
So is this usage or is this places worth accepting?
It was acceptance. If they don't see you available — if they see you one out of three times, they start going, OK, PayPal is available. I should think about using that next time. When you get to two out of three times, they go, wait a minute, PayPal is available. I should start using it. That was super important. It became clear to us that it's not lost. We're not going to keep spraying forever and getting no value. Then we started seeing usage patterns. If I use you two times a week for six weeks in a row, you became my favorite payment instrument. I always used you. That became a target as well.
So this is the notion becoming top of mind at this point.
Top of mind. And this is also where I invented the term — if you've ever heard it — top of wallet. We started creating these terms for the industry because as we learned these things, Visa and MasterCard realized we were actually competing with them now. It was no longer about eBay. We were competing with them on the web. These numbers were known. Visa and MasterCard had figured this out against cash earlier. They had these playbooks. They weren't just blindly going after everything. I started reading up about how Visa and MasterCard came about and how they won — the 1957 Fresno credit card drop. I don't know if you ever heard that story, but that was pivotal in how credit cards were created. Visa didn't just make themselves available to everybody — they went after four specific categories: grocery, drug stores, gas stations, and restaurants.
Things we would call essential today in essence.
Yeah, absolutely. Why? Because they were high frequency — multiple use per week. Grocery twice a week, drug store twice a week, gas station at least once a week, restaurant at least once a week. So they went after those to start racking up two transactions a week for six weeks. We realized, wait a minute, we have to figure this out online. We can't just go after everybody. So we started going after categories. We realized the most important category online at the time was travel. So we went after Southwest Airlines, gave them an amazing rate, told them we need to be very visible everywhere across your site. As soon as they added the button, they saw a 10% immediate jump in sales.
You needed the eyeballs at the time.
We told them exactly how to position it on their website — not wait till the credit card page, but a page or two before, because we had a lot of the information they would collect to create an account. So don't make them create an account, we'll send all that data back to you. Let's not just give you another way to pay, let's create a much, much better experience. Easing that friction will lead to more transactions. As soon as they saw that 10% jump, they couldn't help but tell everybody in the industry. We had every airline in the US in six months. They were all begging us. So we got all of the airlines, and that led to all of the travel agencies.
Incredible.
Then we started realizing, let's go after the categories and the large merchants. It's not the millions. There were 12 million sellers online at the time. It's not the 12 million sellers. It's the 500 that matter. The 500 where 90% of the buying opportunities were happening. Even if we didn't get the transactions, it doesn't matter. That visibility, the fact that they saw us every day.
It's the relevant ubiquity.
It was relevant ubiquity. We created this list of the top 100 and went after that list with a team. For every new major player — this was highly concentrated, it still is — three players have 50% of all e-commerce in the US. So massively concentrated. 100 players had 98% of all e-commerce. 50 players had 50% of it. For every new guy we signed up and got that relevant ubiquity, we saw a massive increase everywhere else across the network. People were starting to be convinced that they could use this everywhere.
I love it. Osama, as I stated in the beginning, it is such a fascinating journey you've had. And you've created so many new things in the industry.
You're too kind. Too kind. Thank you. I look at it as being very lucky and having amazing people working with me everywhere I went.
It's so true. And you're deeply curious too.
Yes, absolutely. I think that's probably the most important thing to look for in other teammates. People who aren't curious will not innovate. People who are curious can't help but innovate.
That's well said. I love it. And thank you so much for this.
No, thank you. My pleasure. Happy we got a chance to chat. Look forward to seeing you again soon.
Can't wait to see you soon. Thank you, Osama.
See how AI agents can transform your payment stack.