Employees at a London fintech paying "significant" bonuses are divided on its culture

Checkout.com, once the most valuable fintech in the UK in 2022, has emerged from a challenging period for the sector looking stronger than ever. In the payments firm's 2025 annual letter it revealed that revenue was up over 30% for the second consecutive year. Insiders point to Checkout's unique hard-driving culture as a reason for its success.

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We've spoken to various current and former Checkout.com employees. They say one of the firm's idiosyncrasies is its "highly decentralised model where each team owns everything end-to-end, from infrastructure to product development." For example, when the firm migrated its cloud infrastructure from Snowflake to Google Cloud's BigQuery, each team handled its own migration independently. 

Jenny Hadlow, COO of Checkout, told eFinancialCareers that the company is "departmental" rather than decentralized, with a focus on "incredibly modular" products. Checkout's products are designed to be mixed and matched rather than sold in bulk, so the firm gives its "product leaders the autonomy to build in a super fast-paced environment." She said that Checkout's teams push updates to their infrastructure and products on a daily basis.

There are benefits and drawbacks to Checkout's model. One technologist said building a product at Checkout is "attractive from a learning perspective and is exciting initially," but can become stressful and inefficient at scale. "This model may have contributed to burnout in some teams," he said. Another employee said there's "nothing inherently wrong with it, but Checkout is very specific in how it wants to operate. I just could not get on with it."

It ties into one of Checkout's twelve operating principles, 'Be The Owner,' which Hadlow said is one of the most important things she looks for in prospective employees. Employees are expected to be willing to contribute in "every challenge and opportunity in what is a very complicated industry."

Checkout holds its employees to a high standard. One former employee said that "OKRs tended to be ambitious, and there was a strong managerial focus on delivering them." He said that engineers in particular weren't happy with that setup. 

Checkout has taken a similar approach to Revolut by developing an internal metrics-focused performance management tool. Checkout's tool, Fabric, had its first full year of use in 2025, and is designed to ensure Checkout employees adhere to the firm's operating principles.

We've heard varying reports on the level of turnover in the organization as a result of this performance driven culture. Some employees said they "didn't observe unusually high turnover" while others said they noticed "a lot... both voluntarily and involuntarily." Checkout's jobs data seems to suggest there have been departures. In its annual letter it said it posted 700 jobs last year, but only grew headcount by 100. However, those jobs are also thought to include internal promotions, pipeline hiring like internships, and listings that have carried over into 2026.

208,000 people applied for jobs at Checkout last year, meaning less than 0.4% of applicants get hired. Hadlow said the firm has a "really strong belief" in its current talent pool, and is up front about its expectations in the application process. The firm takes a rigorous approach to hiring, with "hundreds of hiring managers across the company," and has instituted a 'bar raiser' stage in which Checkout's highest performing and longest serving employees come in at the end of the hiring process and assess candidates to make sure they align with the operating principles. This seems to be working, as Checkout has raised its net promoter score to 42, which it says is in the top quartile of technology businesses.

One female employee said she had an "awful" manager and described Checkout as "a bit of a boys club," a sentiment seen in multiple reviews on Glassdoor. Hadlow said this isn't reflective of her experience but that Checkout "listens everywhere" and "[doesn't] want to diminish those voices." She said the bar raiser program and Checkout's metric-focused culture are efforts to remove unconscious bias, and said that the company is currently 39% female. "We recognize that we need to keep pushing those boundaries; we're in an industry where that profile and skew has always been more heavy."

Employees say Checkout is "doing really well as a business." To retain its high-performers, they also say Checkout pays a lot of money. The ex-employee said "bonuses can be significant" if you hit your OKRs, and the female employee said Checkout pays "quite a bit above the industry standard for a lot of jobs as a way to try and convince people to stay." In one of its UK entities, Checkout paid an average of $110k to over 1,000 employees in "wages and salaries, including bonus and termination benefits" in 2024.

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