Goodbye 2024, hello 2025! A year in review, and exciting times ahead

2024 brought many changes to Boku. As the year comes to an end, we reflect on what happened during the year and what we expect from 2025.??

First up, Boku’s refreshed senior leadership team: In January, we welcomed Stuart Neal, who became the new Chief Executive Officer.??

In February, Paul Jarrett joined as General Manager of Banking and Settlement.?

In March, Vic Rodgers was welcomed to the team as Chief People Officer to support our talent growth goals.?

In July, Rob Whittick was designated Chief Financial Officer and our executive leadership team was complete!?

Over the year, we unlocked new verticals such as online travel or on-demand services, expanded our network to 70+ countries, welcomed 100+ people, and achieved strong monthly active user growth in H1 results with a 30% increase and $5.8bn in TPV—16% more than H1 2023—record-setting numbers for Boku!?

Keep on reading to discover the reflections of 2024 and what’s waiting for us in 2025.

CEO, Stuart Neal ?

Boku: Stuart, you joined Boku as a new CEO in January 2024, and Boku has shown great results in terms of growing its business and unlocking new revenue streams. In addition, a new company mission and vision have been developed. So, a lot of change and many successes have happened in 2024. What are some of the most significant milestones Boku has achieved this year??

Stuart Neal: In 2024, Boku built on its strengths, continuing to develop our broad network of LPMs, including new connections in Nigeria and India.

We also obtained our license to process UPI in India as part of our ongoing push into A2A payments, and we launched our first online retail LPM market. These things mean we have continued to help our global merchants grow their businesses across all continents.

But there were new developments, too: We made our first steps towards building a world-leading money movement capability.

We strengthened our Exec Team with the additions of Rob, Vic and Paul.?And we continued to grow our financials in parallel to ongoing investment in the business.

Boku: Where do you envision taking Boku in the next 3–5 years and how do you see Boku’s role in the evolving payment industry?

Stuart Neal: Boku is in a prime position to take advantage of the global shift towards LPMs.??

We will have the broadest global network of LPMs, thus enabling our global merchants to continue to monetise their own growth.?To support our LPM payments business, we will have a differentiated capability to move money under license out of difficult countries on behalf of our merchants. ?

And we will continue to specialise in LPMs and offer ease of connectivity to the world’s most popular payment methods, which are estimated by Juniper Research to account for 59% of the global ecommerce by 2028.?

CPO, Adam Lee ?

Boku: During 2024 we went live and optimized dozens of connections — we now provide our services in over 70 markets worldwide! What were the most successful launches of the year?

Adam Lee: The launch that meant the most to me this year was our first online retail merchant. The success of that launch shows just how robust and dynamic the Boku platform is, enabling us to support a massive ecommerce marketplace the same way we support global app stores like Google Play .

Boku: What are Boku’s priorities for 2025, from the product perspective? How do you see payment industry trends impacting the business?

Adam Lee: All over the world, momentum is building behind A2A instant bank payments, which tend to be most successful when the user experience can match or exceed the experience of other popular app-based payments. From the perspective of our merchants, they want A2A payments to have all the security that comes from a mobile payment but still enjoy the same frictionless experience of a credit card on file. Achieving this perfect balance is a big priority for Boku.?

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CBO, Mark Stannard ?

Boku: In 2024, we welcomed new merchants to our network of connections, from online travel, ticketing and on-demand services industries. What were Boku’s key commercial achievements and milestones for the year?

Mark Stannard: It’s been a very exciting year for Boku. Boku was already well-established in digital commerce—games, streaming services, app stores—through our partnerships with the major tech companies like 谷歌 , 微软 , Netflix , Spotify , 索尼 PlayStation, and so on. And 2024 saw us launch many more connections for our partners in new markets across LatAm, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and APAC.

In 2024 Boku surpassed some major milestones as we ventured into online travel in the ASEAN region and ecommerce. Boku also supported NBCUniversal (Comcast) with its payment marketing platform, enabling a huge number of sign-ups for the National Football League (NFL) Playoffs—at that time the biggest live-streaming events in the history of the internet!?

Boku: What are the key developments that will drive sales for the upcoming year??

Mark Stannard: In 2025, we’ll see Boku continue to roll out major payment programmes, launching multiple local payment methods for the world’s largest tech companies across the globe. We will continue to add new markets, new licenses, new product features and capabilities to support merchants in accepting payments and moving money in every continent.?

CPO, Victoria Rodgers ?

Boku: In 2024 Boku welcomed 122 employees. How did we change our company culture and values to accommodate and represent these new team members, while ensuring that we don’t lose our identity as we grow??

Vic Rodgers: 2024 has been a transformative year for Boku. A year of continued growth, fresh leadership perspectives, and a focus on our vision to be the world’s best-localised payments partner for global commerce.?

With teams across 31 countries and customers spanning the globe, we took deliberate steps to ensure our evolving culture represents the diversity of our workforce and the complexity of our customer base.?

Our refreshed values, Be Customer-Focused, Operate as One, Know the Impact, and Unleash Ingenuity, reflect the global nature of our business today and remind us of what will make the difference going forward. We ran workshops where colleagues from different regions and roles shared their thoughts on what these values mean in their everyday work and how we ‘show up’ for our customers and each other.?

By listening to everyone, we ensure that our refreshed values don’t just look good on paper or painted on the wall—but really connect and reflect our lived realities. That whilst we work across time zones, markets, and with different customers we capture and recognise the commonalities, what unites us and makes all the difference to how we feel about being at Boku and what we want to be known for.

Boku: How do you see Boku's culture evolving? Are there specific initiatives to reinforce our values??

Vic Rodgers: As we grow in company size and global reach, our culture continues to evolve to meet those challenges and opportunities. It takes effort to collaborate globally and adapt to local or customer-specific needs and Boku’ers do this brilliantly day after day. Our friendly, supportive nature is balanced with a drive and focus to deliver exceptional results.??

Communication, alignment, and scalability become increasingly important to ensure we can continue to deliver those results.???

To do this, we’re embedding our guiding principles into everything we do:?

1) Plan Deliberately: We are working to ensure every action—whether in customer-facing roles or internal operations—is intentional, measured, and aligned with clear KPIs. With our people spread across different regions, setting measurable goals helps us stay connected and unified in delivering on our priorities.

2) Build for Scalability: Scaling isn’t just about systems; it’s about mindsets. In a global organisation, we need to automate processes wherever possible and design solutions that are reusable, efficient, and adaptable for multiple markets. This ensures that everyone has the tools they need to succeed.?

3) Focus on Quality: Our customers trust us to deliver high-quality, reliable, and innovative solutions. Maintaining this trust globally means holding ourselves accountable to the same high standards across all regions, while staying agile enough to address local challenges.?

4) Operate with Excellence: We need to be smart when operating globally, from ensuring compliance with local laws to documenting scalable processes that everyone can access and follow. We are focused on building a culture where data-driven decision-making and continuous improvement are second nature.?

This evolution of our culture is not about losing who we are but about growing into the company we need to be to serve our global customer base even better. We balance high performance with the human touch that will continue to make us special, a company to work for and do business with.

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GM of Banking and Settlement, Paul Jarrett

Boku: Our expanding banking and settlement capabilities have grown considerably in 2024, with growth projected to continue in 2025. What were the key learnings from our banking and settlement operations this year??

Paul Jarrett: Merchants continue to want a faster and more secure settlement. As Boku moves funds globally across borders for merchants, it’s essential that we continue to develop fast, efficient, and robust processes to ensure the delivery of funds. Boku uses its global strategic network of banks in conjunction with its Treasury technology platform to facilitate an automated global settlement capability.?

Boku: What are Boku’s plans for expanding our banking and settlement capabilities in the next year??

Boku continues to invest in foreign exchange (FX) and technology to support solutions that focus on solving merchant problems: deeper access to pools of emerging market liquidity, innovative solutions for marketplaces and ecommerce, and market data products that provide increased transparency for merchants across the transaction life-cycle.?

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CFO, Rob Whittick

Boku: Four months ago, you joined Boku to contribute to Boku's continued growth and success. Revenues went up 24% to $47.3m, adjusted EBITDA grew 18%, maintaining a 30% margin, and cash reserves reached $148.5m, how did our financial performance compare to our expectations? What were the key drivers of our results??

Rob Whittick: Boku is, and will continue to be, successful as we help our merchants be successful by providing access for them to increasing numbers of customers across the world through new products, new regions and new issuers. Looking at our half-year results we were delighted to bring 30% more monthly active users to our merchants and, as a result, increase their total payment volumes by 26% on a constant exchange rate basis. ?

As a result of supporting our merchants our own revenues increased in the first half of 2024 when compared to the first half of 2023. This increased our adjusted EBITDA by 18%—lower than our revenue growth, as we have been investing in the business in 2024 to set ourselves up to drive and support continued growth.?

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Boku: What improvements or innovations in our financial infrastructure are you most excited about? ?

Rob Whittick: There are many innovations that allow finance teams to add economic value to the business in addition to reporting the numbers. There is far greater external and forward-looking data available that can be used to support finance teams in analysing past performance, and to drive future business performance with analysis and ideas. ?

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CTO, Keegan Flanigan

Boku: Considering this year’s successes (new connections, new verticals, new markets and new ways of doing things) what would you consider the biggest achievements for the Technology & Engineering teams this year?

Keegan Flanigan: 2024 has been a banner year for all of Boku, with a huge number of deliveries across all of the teams. As always, it's hard to pick out the "biggest" achievements, but a few ones that I'd like to highlight:

• The launch of UPI: A culmination of multiple years worth of work, including setting up a dedicated data center in India to run our UPI traffic, this launch was huge for Boku and a key deliverable not just for Technology but for the whole business.
• Launch of the first eCommerce with one of the largest merchants in the world that required a custom integration. The teams involved did an amazing job of delivering a huge number of new features to support a successful launch, all on a tight timeline.
• Rollout of our new monitoring solution. The teams have spent 2024 rolling out our new monitoring system (MBOI), which leverages machine learning to help detect outages and degradations across the Boku Network of payment issuers. It's a key tool in helping our NOC and technical teams ensure we deliver the best quality solution to our merchants.

Boku: Looking ahead to 2025, which emerging technologies or industry trends do you believe will have the most significant impact on Boku and its competitive edge?

Keegan Flanigan: Like for most companies, one of the key technologies influencing Boku in 2025 will be the continued adoption of AI. Over the past few years, we've seen the impact the evolution of AI has had across all industries not only on the products being offered, but also on how people do their jobs. Responsible adoption of AI can act as a force multiplier to help make everyone in the company more efficient at what they do and remove a lot of the less value-added work from the business.

In the payments space specifically, I'd say the key industry trend that will have the largest impact is the continued adoption of account-to-account (A2A) payment systems across multiple geographies. As we've seen with the huge adoption of UPI in India and PIX in Brazil, these emerging payment options are key to the next wave of payments and reaching the next generation of tech-savvy consumers. Boku's experience dealing with unique and varied payment methods across multiple geographies puts us in an ideal position to help bring these often bespoke and complex offerings to our merchants in a simple and easy-to-use way.

SVP of Operations, Laura Li

Boku: In 2024 we unlocked new connections and verticals for new and existing merchants, what were the most significant operational successes?

Laura Li: Our operations team is at the forefront of integrating new payment methods into Boku’s expansive payments network and supporting merchants with successful new launches at a global scale.

This year, our focus was on strengthening our LPM technical expertise in designing and building quality payment connections and investing specialized resources in end-to-end testing and post-launch optimization that continue adding value to our issuer and merchant partnership. We also expanded our technical support, business intelligence and fraud prevention operations to better monitor, analyze and safeguard the performance of live connections.

On the payments marketing front, our Delivery and Support Operations teams successfully delivered 80+ partnership launches.

Boku: As we enter 2025, what key operational priorities or changes will your department focus on to support Boku’s goals for the upcoming year?

Laura Li: As our business priorities and competitive landscape change, Operations must operate efficiently, effectively, and at scale.

We will build upon the best practices in all functional areas but with an increased focus on standardization, automation, and adding value to the work and services we deliver. We will also partner with Commercial and Product on delivering customer success initiatives.

What a year! 2024 was full of achievements for Boku : We welcomed new talent, provided new payment methods to industry-leading global merchants, and brought awareness around many payment topics and shared our expertise. We also improved our banking and settlement capabilities and hit financial records in H1—and can only predict more growth and success to come in 2025.?

Would you like to join us on this ride? Check out Boku’s Careers page—we’re hiring!?