Transcript: Gabi Broitman | Primer | The Money Leaking From Your Checkout, and How to Catch It

Meet Gabi and Primer

Eyal David: [00:00] Hi Gabi, how's it going? All good, how are you? A pleasure, we were just talking about Ramat Aviv, we'll pick that up later. So with us is Gabi, who said to call him a payments expert consultant. But really we came to talk about payments, which is always the untapped move you can actually make. Let's start, like we said, with the most, you know, the craziest thing you've seen. Ah, okay.

The customer who paid tens of thousands of dollars a month by mistake

Gabi Broitman: [00:29] Almost the best one. Well, calling it crazy, there are a lot of crazy things in the payments world, for payments people. We get excited about them, I don't know if others would, but... I think it's dollars and cents, basically, in the end: if there's money on the floor, then it's interesting. So there's an interesting story. I lead Primer's operation here. Primer developed a platform for managing your entire payment stack, so obviously we're talking about enterprise companies that sell hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars a year. This is a story with one of our companies, one of our customers, who put the... built the whole integration with us and put our platform in, and saw after a few months that they were actually paying some fee they weren't supposed to be paying at all. And when you can do the multiplication on hundreds of millions of dollars, in this company's case billions of dollars a year, then do the math: they suddenly realized that for almost 12 months they'd been paying tens of thousands of dollars a year, a month, sorry. Just like that, a small thing. Yeah, a small thing, a small thing. So it's an interesting story, and I think we'll run into it a lot in our conversation too, because payments is data, in the end it's data, and the world of payments is really, really complex,

Eyal David: [01:55] and the whole secret here is to look at the data and keep improving. Great, so we'll really talk about that. And, like, the way I see it, there are at least two directions here. There's money I've lost and can save, and there's unlocking new money, right? So maybe touch on that for a moment.

Two directions: saving leaking money vs. unlocking new money

Gabi Broitman: [02:14] So look, they're pretty connected to each other, because the way we look at it, when we sell something online, when we start having complex payment systems, meaning not through a single provider. In Israel people like to build a startup, start selling, and go with Stripe. And then you have Stripe for a certain period, until you start growing, either geographically or in products, and then you start bringing in more and more providers, because it makes a lot of sense that if you sell in South America, you bring a South American provider to handle your payments there, right? And then you hit the problem we talked about, the data. Every payment provider speaks a slightly different language. Now, if you don't know how to normalize that and look at it, you're bleeding all the time. I call it bleeding on purpose, Israelis, I need to wake them up, so you use harsh words, Europeans like it less. So we're bleeding payments all the time, all the time. Even someone who works really, really efficiently constantly has to check where they're bleeding payments. Now, it's a matter of looking at the data, and that, like you said, is one thing: saving the... saving what you have, okay? Like, you can convert much better and also pay lower fees and so on. Now, on the other side, I see a lot of mistakes by product managers who, for example, enter a certain country, okay? They're now entering Switzerland, okay? Or entering Japan, they want to sell there. So everything's ready, the whole funnel works, the products are adapted, and the language, and all of it, but they don't provide the local Bit, okay? Or the local payment method, which on its own often increases conversion, because money is trust, and if we come and see that the local payment method of the Japanese, or the German, or the Swiss is there, we feel more secure in our purchase, and that's really proven. I mean, you really see it, that when you add local payment methods,

Why every provider speaks a different language, and what it costs you

Entering a new market: why a local payment method is critical

Eyal David: [04:32] you can increase your conversion, and in the end it's the... I really remember, when I was at Fiverr, wow, about 12 years ago I think, we wanted to do, they did a few localization moves, one of them was slow, they really wanted to open, I don't remember, it was probably South America. So we put in PayPal, we really built the whole flow, and then we put in PayPal with, you know, you get redirected to another screen, to basically give the option of local money there, with a crazy fee. Yeah, well. So yeah, as I said, it didn't work that well, yeah. But the payment itself can also be a blocker, I think, also in the sense of, okay, I got all the way to checkout and I have no way to pay, right? Yeah, so you see, there's... it's not only trust, that's what I'm saying. Yes, yes, absolutely.

Gabi Broitman: [05:13] It's also, you really see it in surveys. There's a company, we can put it in the links later, called Baymard, a research company, and you see the reasons for cart abandonment over the years. Maybe you know their website, an amazing site. And among the abandonment reasons, the ones that interest me as a payments expert, you really see that when I started looking at this almost a decade ago, six percent abandoned because they didn't find the payment method they were looking for. I mean, I came to pay with PayPal, I didn't see PayPal, I came to pay with Bit, I didn't see Bit. I believe that in the last year, 2025, we're already at about nine percent. I mean, nine percent abandonment by people you've already, you know, already caught, they're already there. Now you just need to give them the last push, the final push,

The Baymard stat: 9% cart abandonment over payment methods

Eyal David: [06:05] and you don't offer that payment method. Well, it's not even pushing them, it's doing the most basic thing, right? It's on the critical path. Now, another thing PayPal had at that time, it was a curiosity, but there was actually paying in Bitcoin. Ahead of its time, it... totally ahead of its time. Yeah, no, also, you know, it was really nice, but it wasn't used much. Maybe back then it was also a bit of a legality issue, like, there's a lot of money and so on. But do you want to tell us for a second what's going on now with crypto currencies? So I'll put some order in it.

Crypto payments: where things stand today

Gabi Broitman: [06:36] Paying in Bitcoin is, okay, it's, you know, the average person on the street might say Bitcoin, and really confuse it with crypto, right? For the reasonable person, as the lawyers say. Bitcoin is a name that actually refers to something much broader than that. Now, our world is changing very, very fast. I mean, when you were at Fiverr ten or twelve years ago and you offered it, you really were ahead of your time offering payment in Bitcoin. Today we're already talking about tens, maybe even hundreds, of crypto wallets, and in recent years the whole story of stablecoins and the ability to pay in USDC, Circle and so on, has also become more mainstream. So we definitely see bigger volumes, and we talked about this a bit before the recording. Payments are very, very local: what fits Israel won't fit India and won't fit Argentina and so on. I mean, when you go to... so there, I said Argentina, and I also told you I was born in Argentina, so I'm closing a circle. So when you go to Argentina, the currency there isn't stable, and so there are a lot of people, mostly young people, who use... who basically convert their pesos into stablecoins, yes, and peg them to the dollar, so they also want to pay with them. So you'd offer that option if you're targeting the Argentine audience, because there are many examples like this, right? The world is very, very wide, but not every country is worth addressing, because it depends on what you sell and who you target, but in the end you do want to adapt your checkout

Argentina and stablecoins

Eyal David: [08:33] to the population that wants to buy from you. I have, like, some crazy chart open here from '25 about the growth, actually, the circulation of stablecoins. I think it, I didn't ask, but I think it points, like, not only to that, if it were only, you know, South America, we probably wouldn't see such a jump. Of course, of course. There's another thing here, right? There's also the speed and the...

Gabi Broitman: [08:52] Like, all the processing of it. So, yes, there are a lot of advantages to it, right? Look, in the end, the process that happened over the last decade, and I entered the payments world about a decade ago, right? And I actually came in from the crypto world. I always said, I keep giving the example that when my mom knows how to pay with this payment method, whatever it is, Bit or crypto or a stablecoin or whatever. When my mom knows how to pay with that payment method, I know it's an accepted payment method, right? May she live a long life, as they say, she's not technological, but Bit, for example, she already uses, right? Now, the last decade, and especially the last few years, we see it entering the mainstream more and more. Today we even have agentic commerce, which maybe we'll talk about, where you basically see that the payment systems we use today are credit cards. It's a bit funny what I'm about to say, but they're systems from the fifties, infrastructure from the fifties, many, many layers, and at the very end you have about two seconds until you get an approval, right? What's two seconds? In a world where we're in a hurry and want instant answers, and in a world where your agent buys something for you, the agent can't wait two seconds. That's one thing, okay? The second thing, we talk a lot about programmable money. I mean, our regular money can't be programmed, but when we talk about stablecoins and agentic commerce, we can program the money. Release the money only after I receive the product. I mean, you know, you can do a lot of things in these worlds that will also build more trust and obviously create more conversion. Yes, exactly, you touched here,

Why Visa and Mastercard aren't going anywhere

Eyal David: [11:02] it touched conversion completely, two seconds and that whole thing. It should also lower the percentage of transactions that get declined, right? Because it's trust in both directions. Yes, yes, yes. So it's a very positive thing, which also really shakes up Visa and Mastercard. Do you want to say a bit about that? Yeah, look. Again, I have the chart open here, that's why I'm speaking with confidence.

Gabi Broitman: [11:24] I wouldn't rush to eulogize these companies. Because none of the companies from the... yes, from the big schemes, is going anywhere in the foreseeable future. The foreseeable future, yes. Now I'll also explain why, how I see things. First, the traditional worlds of credit card payments won't disappear, because we won't make them disappear. You're not going to cut up your credit cards now and move exclusively to some app, right, even if there's some kind of USDC here in Israel. You won't do that. You'll still keep the cards, maybe your kids, maybe grandchildren, who knows. So that's one thing. Second, these companies see, they see what's coming, and so if you look at the list of investments and business partners of Visa, and of Mastercard, and of American Express, you'll see that stablecoins are a very essential component in this story, and so they're not trying, you know, to fight it. In some cases they're even leading it.

Eyal David: [12:44] Good point, yes. I thought American Express probably wouldn't want to change everything they do again. They already did it once, with trains or something. No, but what I think will make the change is actually agentic usage, don't you think?

Can regulation stop this shift?

Gabi Broitman: [13:00] In the end, the financial infrastructure behind it, once you, you know, control it, and again, these organizations know, I'll give you an example. About five years ago there was talk, some trend that now everyone will pay account-to-account, okay? Bank to bank, they'll do bank transfers, that's how they'll pay merchants online. In Israel it was talked about less, but if you'd looked five years ago at what was happening in the UK, for example, there was a big hype there around account-to-account. Look, Visa invested in a very, very big company, I believe Tink, and you saw them entering this thing with great force, and so I, again, there are people sitting there, and I know the teams of both Visa and Mastercard in Israel, which run a very, very large operation relative to the size of our small country, yes. Because we buy a lot of words, right? No, because there are centers here, there's brainpower here, or, I don't know, there's very, very great talent here, and they are staying ahead of the curve. I wouldn't, let's say if I, I don't, but if I had shares in these companies, I wouldn't rush to pull them. For sure, and tell me, how does this look from a regulation standpoint?

Eyal David: [14:39] Like, with these currencies and in general? Look,

Gabi Broitman: [14:44] so we talked about locality, okay? Payments are local. By the way, a few years ago I had a course at the College of Management, I ran a course on payments, on digital payments, and the first slides were like this: payments is trust, and payments is local. Always think about these things. Now, regulation is a product of the local, okay? Every country decides its own standards, Israel adheres quite closely to the European standards actually, which is good, and you can't look at everything as one block. I mean, the regulator, by the way, in Israel too has improved enormously in the last five years. There's all the work by Oded, Oded Salomi, if some of you know him, and many other good people. I think it's hard to answer this question globally. You have to look country by country. So I'll expand on it, I'll make it more precise, okay?

Eyal David: [15:55] Like, regulation, I don't know what Oded did, but I probably know it without being aware, but regulation is a slow thing. This thing is running, like, very fast. So how do these two things work together with these forces? Look, first of all,

Gabi Broitman: [16:14] you can't go against regulation in the payments world, okay? It's a wall, there's no game here. I mean, try to do something that isn't in line with regulation and they'll block you, your PSP will block you, okay? Or won't accept you in the first place. Yes, I've already been stopped there, yes. So a lot of people get stopped there. So you can't go against it. On the other hand, the story of payments, and the more specific story of digital payments and their digitization, or crypto and digital currencies, I think many regulators understand that the speed and accessibility of it that exist today, again, that didn't exist a decade ago, also drive the economy. So regulators in the end are, I'll tell you a secret, right? They come to protect us, you and me, from merchants, not from the brands we know and trust, but from those who, and by the way, in Israel too there were examples of merchants who managed to penetrate that envelope. They simply scammed people, we saw it with perfumes and some gymnastics products and the like, all kinds of things. So the regulator comes to protect us. On the other hand, he understands that he can't stop progress, and he doesn't want to stop it either. He wants to release it on his terms, as long as he knows he's protecting you and me.

Agentic commerce: how the regulator copes

Eyal David: [18:02] Okay? There isn't really a war here. No, not at all. So I'll even add another nuance to that. Okay? If we pile on for a second the fact that there are now new forms of payment, and pile on what we got a taste of, but we left the whole agentic world a bit for later, so I'll expand on it for a second. Horen was a guest here with me in one of the previous episodes, talked about e-commerce, really talked about the agentic shift happening there. Basically, in the end an agent buys instead of you, and now we're layering on top of that a new form of payment that's faster. How is the regulator supposed to deal with this and protect me, out of all of it, me, and the business on the other side?

Gabi Broitman: [18:38] So look, whoever passes the payment through ultimately has to deal with it. I mean, the PSP that approves, because in the end, within this process, yes, today, yes, I don't know how it'll be in the future, there are many forms, but today, within this process, there's at the very end a credit card, okay? Now, the question of whether your transaction goes through or not, okay? That's the merchant's matter, ultimately, it isn't. The regulator legislates general laws. The merchant passes your transaction to that PSP, that acquirer, and the acquirer decides, whatever, it's a system, it's layers, right? It's not even really the acquirer, it's the card issuer that decides whether to approve the transaction or not, okay? I mean, there's, in payments in general there are many, many layers. So there's some complexity here, because it's not really you paying, right? Oh, my agent paid. Now, what happens if there's a dispute, or what happens if there's a chargeback, you want your money back, so you'll come and say, no, he paid, he ran off with my card. But today there are already, first, companies, there are companies that know how to do KYC for agents, yes. There are companies that know how to... From a regulation standpoint, does it hold? That's basically my question. Again, it holds because in the end, at the very end, there's an issuer, whoever issued your card, and decides whether he wants to pass this transaction or not. And if he decided he wants to pass the transaction, then yes, it also depends on what you're buying, you know, and where you're buying. So you work on the assumption that the merchant passed KYB, know your business, and is legit, and you work on the assumption that your card is valid,

KYC for agents: what does it even mean

Eyal David: [20:36] and indeed in the end the transaction gets approved. Okay, it's an interesting field. Okay, I think we'll come back to talk about Stripe, about the integration with OpenAI, but just before that, there's also the company-size angle, right? There are acquiring solutions, billing solutions, payments and so on. I read somewhere, just before this, that Amazon, for example, had to hold foreign-currency reserves in many currencies to basically support their payments system. Do you know about that? Yes, maybe in their FX, yes. In the end,

Amazon and dozens of foreign-currency balances

Gabi Broitman: [21:15] you set up, by the way, what I'm about to say, I see in Israel that it's very challenging for companies here, e-commerce companies, and I'll tell you a bit about this area. You need to set up, you set up a business, you sell, I don't know, phones, phone cases, phone covers, say, for example. Already a successful business, you've set me up, okay, makes me think about retiring. You've got something else, sexier. And you go global, I mean, in the end, most companies here that sell online at scale, yes, not a few million a year, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, in the end they target the big world, the wide world. Now, there's a big difference, notice that when you go into Amazon, it asks you whether you want to pay in shekels or in dollars, right? Now, everything inside that layer, that small decision of yours as a customer, imposes all kinds of different fees, either on you or on the merchants. It's a very complex topic, FX, currencies. Now, Israeli companies, I see... Just to be precise, it's not only changing the displayed currency, it's actually the currency you'll be charged in. Exactly, yes, yes. So that's exactly the story. Israeli companies, I often see they're very afraid of it. First, you need to change all the display and the whole front end, right? You need to change it, and suddenly put Japanese yen, write in Japanese, you need to explain, you're charging in the local currency and so on, but we're in the conversion business. The less fine print, the better. Yes, that's for sure, that's for sure, but if you come to sell in Japan, and you offer them the same phone case in Japanese yen, okay? Not just for appearance, not just translating for them how much it'll cost and then charging them in dollars, but you actually charge them in yen and save them the conversion fee they have with their card issuer, then you're actually increasing your conversion. But then what happens? And this goes back a bit to the Amazon story. So you're connected, say, to Stripe, okay? And now you hold, that guy in Japan bought your phone case for 10 dollars, I don't know, made of diamonds or something, very expensive, and right now you have, sorry, for ten dollars, right now you have ten, or ten yen, sorry. So right now you have ten yen at Stripe in Japan. Now decide, what do you want to do with it? You have nothing to do with yen, you pay your employees either in dollars or in shekels, right? You have nothing to do with it. Now, Stripe needs to ask you, what do you want to do? You want me to send you the yen, give me a bank account that can receive yen, you don't have one. Your bank account in Israel can receive dollars or shekels, right? So there are all kinds of layered solutions like Payoneer and so on, which let you, or Airwallex, which let you open all kinds of bank accounts that can receive these currencies. In Amazon's case, we're talking about dozens of currencies, I assume, and so they need... In crazy amounts too. In insane amounts, yes, not a small commerce company. So there too there are many, many layers. In general, again, I'm saying, in the payments world there are tons and tons of layers, and it requires a lot of depth and specialization to handle these things.

How currency localization lifts conversion

The Wix experience: 120 providers around the world

Eyal David: [25:09] Like, I'm Jewish, so the first thing I said was, okay, we'll open a bank there, I have money, but it's such a headache. Not simple. Exactly.

Gabi Broitman: [25:16] How was it at Wix? At Wix you also operated in lots of... So at Wix, look, Wix basically has two arms. One arm is basically Wix Payments, I mean, Wix has its own payments brand. In the world of money we talk about whether we touch the money or don't touch the money. Once you touch the money, regulation is imposed on you. Wix doesn't touch the money. It basically uses providers like Stripe and a few others, PayPal and Adyen and maybe one or two more, and basically the front, it white-labels them and has a brand called Wix Payments. So that's one arm. The second arm is basically the whole long tail of providers around the world, by the way, when I worked at Wix that's what I led, we basically built a platform that connected all the providers, about 120 providers worldwide were connected. I mean, the whole long tail, if someone wanted to open a shop in Congo selling straw baskets, he could connect to his local provider, I don't know, the local hype, okay, or the local PayMe. That's the infrastructure that basically... And were there territories where it wasn't worth it, say? Sure. So Wix didn't operate in them, or did they leave the default payment? You operate there, but, I mean, you don't operate there locally, but the local merchants often had, say, an account abroad, okay? An account in the United States, and so they could run Stripe there. So that's the complexity: there are countries where it simply wasn't worth it for us to bring up the... bring up the alternative payments of... Ah, it's probably also not an interesting enough market. Yes, no, yes, small markets. Israel, for example, is a very interesting market for Wix, and so you'll see Bit and Apple Pay and Google Pay there, and all the things we actually use here day to day.

Eyal David: [27:22] Okay. Well, let's go back for a second, step by step, to AI. So where do you think this is going in five years? Good question. I think it's... maybe, sorry, let's just say for a second what happened with OpenAI and Stripe, just in a word? Yes.

Stripe and OpenAI: what really happened there

Gabi Broitman: [27:40] Look, Stripe is an amazing company, right? It's enough to visit their website to understand how seriously this company takes, very deeply, its work, and it's also, again, always one step ahead, if not two. Stripe's connection to the whole AI topic started a few years ago, okay? First conceptually and then really in execution. I think the moves they're making are... look, I look at them from my position at Primer, right? As the one leading Primer's operation, I'm Switzerland. I mean, I have no preference for any of the providers, but there's no doubt that when I see Stripe's work, on one hand, it's amazing work. They really offer everything you want, and they lead this field, I think they'll capture a significant share of this world of agentic commerce, you can see it. On the other hand, they're very aggressive, okay? Sorry, but they're very aggressive. That's not a bad thing. In the payments world there's a lot of competition and a lot of elbows, and that's perfectly fine. It works in our favor,

The future of payments is invisible

Eyal David: [29:18] in the merchants' favor, and in the end, in the buyers' favor too, this problem. We talked here in a previous episode, the one I mentioned with Itai, actually from the merchant's angle, that now you have... of course, you know, it could be amazing for them and there'll be more purchases and so on on one hand, and on the other hand people won't come into their website, they'll have less influence on conversion. And it's a really interesting area, when suddenly the brand itself doesn't have much influence on the whole purchase process, but suddenly you also don't have influence on conversion from the checkout side, from the payment side at all.

Gabi Broitman: [29:57] Where does that put the merchants? Someone once told me, The Future of Payments is Invisible, which is worth a sentence, that was maybe even two years ago, and there's no doubt it's moving to the backseat, I mean, I can tell you, even from Primer, from my experience at Primer, I see people coming to us, I mean, it's a lead machine, right? They come to us not from the website at all, you invest so much money in the website, you build a new brand, and in the end, by the way, a very, very big Israeli account came to me, they also signed with us in the end, and it came through GPT. That's crazy. It really raises a lot of thoughts: how much I invest in my front end, when I could basically have fed GPT a set of documents, right? I don't need visuals at all.

When your brand starts disappearing too

Eyal David: [30:54] On the other hand, I do think you somewhere lose your connection with your potential customer, you no longer really know their behavior, where, what they're looking at, what they chose, and so on. In some cases maybe you do, but there's some disconnect here, like the customer isn't really yours anymore, at least not at the start.

Gabi Broitman: [31:23] I actually think that in the checkout world, agentic commerce can do very good things. Itai is from the mattress company, right? Yes. Yes. I listened to that podcast, it was very interesting. So look, my head goes to all sorts of places, right? For example, I in general, I mean, I've been working with Claude for a year and a half, something like that, I'm not some big expert, but I love working with it, and I hate routine, so every little thing I have, I drive it crazy, and I keep telling myself, it's as if I have, like, I see in my imagination, it's as if I have some secretary or personal assistant. I keep calling it and explaining what I want, and it goes for me. Now, when I look at the future of agentic commerce, I see, I imagine myself calling my personal assistant and telling it, listen, I want to travel with my family to Italy, take this budget and go negotiate the prices with them, and find out if they have something more, extra, I don't know, and this is your cap, don't spend more than this. I actually see agents with an agent waiting for them on the other side that knows how to negotiate with them, make them offers, tell them, wait, listen, your budget is 1,000 dollars for the whole family, but if you add, I don't know, 200 dollars, I'll upgrade your seats. So that, you know, I define for it the margins I'm willing to let it go over budget, and for what? And it'll do the work for me. Now, think that in the end this process happens in milliseconds. That's it. And a bigger transaction is created than I planned in advance, but it also gives me value.

The future of buying: an agent negotiating with an agent

Eyal David: [33:32] Yes, like, what I take from this is, well, interesting whether there'll be more transactions as a result, right? The emotion is also removed from the purchase itself, and it's interesting where that will lead. It's a whole area, you know, the emotion we have when we part with our money. Because with cash it was hardest, but now it's not at all... And there's another thing, today cancellations and returns are a thing, and that's also going to drop. Because who am I going to get mad at if I'm now going to return what I'm mad about? Only at my agent.

Gabi Broitman: [34:05] It's really interesting where this field will go. Going forward. I'll tell you something else, another point. Look, if I'm searching today, and this is a point about front end and back end, okay? If I'm searching for shoes today, okay? Sometimes, yes, I find myself scrolling Instagram and suddenly see something, some nice shoe or nice shirt. It's enough for me to take a screenshot of that shoe, because it's very unique, right? I don't need to go to that store. Look at that. I give it to the agent and tell it, listen, this is the shoe I want, this is my budget. Go find it. Now, whether it was, I don't know, the site of, whatever, Adidas, okay? I don't need it to buy on Adidas's site. Go to a site that doesn't even exist, that has a front end, and buy there. What do I care? The shoe will arrive, it'll arrive, yes. Check it's really reliable, check, I don't know what...

Eyal David: [35:06] So there's no longer that attachment maybe that we had when we'd really look and see what we're buying.

Gabi Broitman: [35:14] Now, we, you and I, are maybe still there. I estimate this will change fundamentally in the coming decade.

Eyal David: [35:22] Fundamentally. So what you're saying is, in your estimate, the number of transactions will go up. I think so. By the way,

Gabi Broitman: [35:31] when you look at, in general, I've seen it over the last decade, you look at the number of businesses, and maybe I'll surprise you, although not, because you know this world, but there's still a lot of room for many, many businesses that still have no online presence. The world isn't Israel, the world isn't the United States, the world isn't Europe. There are still... you talked about South America, that's an excellent representative example. There are still so many places in the world, even in Europe, in the United States, for sure, that have no online presence, and AI makes that much easier. Think that once, what's once? Two years ago, when you wanted to build a website, you had to go to Wix and really drag things around, I'm not talking to you about a decade ago, right? Drag things and design, and it was annoying, and then you had to go add the provider, and you didn't know which provider to add, and what suits you, and so on. Today you go to Wix, you do it with Base44, or you go to anyone else, whatever, or you do it directly in Claude, and you do the whole cycle. So an 18-year-old guy in the United States whose grandparents have a mom-and-pop shop puts them online.

How AI will bring tens of millions more businesses online

Eyal David: [36:55] Yes, and also now, just a second before, you even said that there probably won't be, it's a need for a certain percentage of the audience, which is really interesting, I had a really interesting point, and it slipped away,

Gabi Broitman: [37:06] so maybe we'll come back to it in a moment. I'll talk too much about it. God forbid. Ah, I know what, about discovery, which is interesting, because, like, today you, like you said, you scroll, and you have a certain amount of attention you can invest in discovery, and suddenly, if I have an agent that can now pump things at me, again, according to criteria I gave it, yes. So there's probably a lot more room not just for the number of transactions, but also for the number of products I'll be exposed to. Yes, because the agent is also, you know, it's not... it's a curation tool, I think. It's a conversation. It's a conversation, right? It can, like, suggest things to me, and by the way, I use a lot of

Eyal David: [37:48] voice, like. A lot. I barely move my fingers anymore. Are you talking about dictation or an actual conversation? No, no, a conversation, a conversation. Don't you feel the quality of the answer drops significantly?

Gabi Broitman: [38:01] No, I didn't feel that. Wow, especially from three onward, from three onward at all. I'll start paying attention, I really like it. It opens up the thing, and it lets me really have a conversation that I see often leads to other places too. So maybe in this area too I'll get more ideas. Now, I personally don't buy much, but I look, you know, at the next generations, my kids, my daughters, you know, it's the...

How Gabi uses AI day to day, mostly by voice

Eyal David: [38:34] That's where it's going. Okay, it's just GPT. Tell me, now you've made me curious, what do you talk to it about? Do you have some kind of tip, something that really works?

Gabi Broitman: [38:43] Look, my world, the world of payments, I'll tell you something. When I started a decade ago, I started, I was sitting at home, I was unemployed, I'd finished with my startup, split from my partners, was looking for what to do, and I had no connection at all to payments. The bank called me, I had a debt of 3,000 shekels, an overdraft. The lady, whose name I don't remember, asked me to cover the enormous debt. And after I finished getting angry at her, it's not her fault, but I finished getting angry at her and hung up, I went online and typed, and back then there was only Google, I typed, how do banks make money? That was the beginning of my romance, which hasn't ended to this day, with the payments world, and suddenly I realized, wow, how interesting this is. And very quickly I got to credit cards, and how credit works, and it was really hard for me to find things. Today, with GPT, it's just crazy, because you've already understood, and you also came with a lot of knowledge about the payments world, payments is made up of tons of layers, tons of nuances, and tons of words where one payments expert will tell you this word and another payments expert will tell you a different word, and they mean the same thing. So I dig, and it's my passion too, payments, so I dig into it a lot, a lot, a lot. So you basically learn a lot with it. Learn a lot. You know what works great for me?

Eyal David: [40:17] Taking a book, whether it's a book I've read or not, mainly a non-fiction book that you learn something from, and then practicing it with it. Ah, nice. So, say, negotiation is what I'm working on with it now. Ah, nice. Yes, it's going great. Portuguese worked less well for me with it, by the way. Cool. Okay, I'm glad you touched on career, a little touch. Do you have a career tip you can share?

Getting into payments, and a career tip

Gabi Broitman: [40:42] Look, I'll give a bit of my history, like, the advice from my history. Until a decade ago I focused on... look, I always say, there's a field and there's a role, okay? Or a domain and a role, okay? I jumped between domains and always stayed in more or less the same role. I was in business development and operations roles, but I jumped between domains, okay? A decade ago, when I got to the payments world, I said, whatever happens, I don't know, I love this. It's, it's, like, I don't know, hard to explain, it's fun. Money interests everyone, it has, it folds all the emotions into it, right, hate, love, jealousy and so on. And I said, whatever happens, I'm staying in this field, I'm specializing in this field. Now, look what I've managed to do in the last decade. I've managed to do business development, I've managed to do operations, I've managed to do sales. I love everything I do. Why do I love everything I do? I also feel very confident in it. Because I understand what I'm saying. When I sit with someone, or when I'm selling, or when I'm building a project, building an architecture, I also do a bit of product, right? I understand my field in depth. And so my advice to young people, and older ones too, right? Focus on some field you have a passion for, and what you'll do, what your role will be there, that in my view will sort itself out, less so. Like, I mean, worry about it less. First of all, understand what keeps you up, in my case, because I love the night, so what keeps you up at night,

Eyal David: [42:41] or gets you up early in the morning? Money. Tell me, but you opened another thread here about why it's passion. We could talk about that, how you found the passion. We'll do it next time, and I'm really glad you came. I'll say, I'll probably say this at the start too, that there's a really interesting touch here on where there's potential, and basically checkout and payments in general. I think another thing, potential in Israel, there are tons of fintech companies, and again, if you're looking for a job and so on, then it's a field that... the world of, the fintech field in Israel, there are hundreds of companies here,

Why Israeli fintech is a huge opportunity

Gabi Broitman: [43:23] hundreds of companies. There are phenomenal people here in this field. Some of them, you know, also moved abroad, but still preserve the Israeliness and the Israeli DNA. I think as a field, fintech is enormous. By the way, two months ago I lectured in a program at... at Tel Aviv University, and they introduced me as a fintech expert, and I said, no, no, no, no, fintech is too big, it's broad. Fintech folds a lot of things into it. Within fintech there's payments, and by the way, within payments too there are sub-fields. So I recommend to all the... I work with a lot of juniors, I help them find direction in life and so on, I recommend to anyone who feels a bit that this is their passion, that it excites them a bit,

Eyal David: [44:23] go there. That's it, that's an excellent suggestion, because, like, everyone talks about cyber in Israel, right? Right. There really are tons of fintech companies. Right. Look, money has always been, and it'll stay.

Gabi Broitman: [44:33] We're creatures who, at least modern, Western people, always want something new, and e-commerce will always exist. And what drives e-commerce is money, it's the underlying technology, right?

Eyal David: [44:52] So it'll be there. Right. So it's not a bad bet. Yes, not a bad bet. Elon Musk comes out against this bet, but right? He talks about trade, but fine. Yes, fine, look, he comes out against the bet, and in the end... on the other hand, yes. You have a wallet in X. Right. You know, so he knows what he's doing. I think so too. Alright, thank you very much. Thank you. And we'll leave a link for anyone who wants to get in touch with you. Yes, of course. I'd be really happy to help and talk and advise.

Gabi Broitman: [45:20] I'll gladly do that. Great. Alright, bye, thanks a lot. Thanks a lot, bye.