Coda provides payment and commerce infrastructure for digital publishers across markets with different rules, consumer preferences, and fraud risks. The company has built its operations around that variation, while using AI to automate narrowly defined work rather than treating it as a universal fix.
In this interview, CEO Shane Happach explains how those systems fit together, where operational complexity persists, and what he expects technology to change next.
What are the biggest technical challenges in global payments and digital commerce?
The honest answer is that the complexity compounds in ways that aren’t immediately obvious from the outside.
The most visible challenge is payment localisation. Supporting different payment methods across markets involves more than plugging in APIs. Every market has its own settlement cycles, technical integration quirks, and failure modes. Local payment methods are widely used in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, and each has different authentication flows, refund protocols, and consumer expectations.
The less visible challenge is regulatory fragmentation. The rules governing out-of-app commerce, external links, alternative billing, and third-party storefronts differ materially among the United States, the European Union, Indonesia, Japan, Brazil, and other markets. The Google Play changes announced in March 2026 illustrate this: The fee structure is being introduced on different schedules across jurisdictions, with different rules for existing and new installs, while a US court injunction remains in effect. Tracking these differences can be difficult for publishers. This complexity also encompasses local taxes, compliance obligations, chargebacks, fraud, and the legal-entity requirements in each market.
The third challenge is fraud at scale. Gaming transactions are frequent and often anonymous, making them attractive targets. Kaspersky recorded more than 20 million attempted attacks on gaming platforms in 2025. In Southeast Asia, gaming-related cyberthreats increased by 86% in the second half of that year. The technical challenge is to build detection and prevention systems without introducing enough friction to impair the experience of legitimate players. Achieving that balance is hard.
What technology platforms underpin Coda‘s operations?
Coda’s operations rely on interconnected platforms for payment processing, direct-to-consumer webstores, checkout integration, consumer distribution, and digital rewards.
Our payment infrastructure connects publishers, webstores, and commercial partners with local payment methods, including e-wallets and phone billing. It accommodates markets where credit cards are not the dominant payment method. In Southeast Asia, 55% of mobile gamers pay through digital wallets, 24% prefer carrier billing, and 13% use credit cards. Supporting this range of preferences is a core function of the payment platform.
We have a direct-to-consumer webstore that combines payments, merchant-of-record services, localisation, and commerce tools, allowing publishers to operate branded webstores in different markets. It gives publishers control over their storefronts and the customer experience. Its localisation layer adapts the payment experience to the different ways consumers transact in each market.
The webstores use the same payment infrastructure as Coda’s consumer platforms. An automated onboarding system uses AI to produce a working storefront from an app-store URL in roughly two minutes.
Our in-game-to-web checkout integration takes players directly from a game to the relevant checkout page. It carries over their player ID and preselects the item they want to buy, removing the need to search for the product or log in again.
Coda also operates consumer distribution platforms for gaming, digital content, and gift cards. These include consumer marketplaces and regional storefronts that connect publishers directly with customers across different markets.
Beyond consumer distribution, our technology supports business-to-business-to-consumer digital rewards, allowing brands to offer digital content for customer acquisition, loyalty programs, and employee engagement. This extends the use of prepaid digital content from gaming into corporate rewards.
Which operations create the greatest complexity at Coda, and how are they managed?
Historically, one of the most operationally complex areas was launching and configuring webstores.
Before we rebuilt the process, launching a webstore for a new publisher involved manually configuring merchant IDs, payment tokens, and localised payment channels across as many as 70 stores in more than 30 languages. Skilled staff spent hours completing repetitive configuration after the deployment requirements had already been determined. The business logic was in place, but execution was slow and prone to errors.
We treated this as an automation problem rather than a reason to expand the team. We rebuilt the go-live pipeline using AI agents. The first phase, which is currently in use, automates tasks ranging from processing an app-store link to generating base HTML, sandbox environments, and localised payment configurations. It can produce a prototype webstore in roughly two minutes.
Merchant-of-record operations are another source of complexity because they involve managing tax collection, compliance filings, chargeback disputes, and fraud across multiple jurisdictions. We manage this through local teams and centralised tools. Under this arrangement, publishers maintain a single commercial relationship with Coda, while the company handles the associated legal and financial work.
What technology capability will most change how platforms like Coda operate over the next few years?
Over the next three to five years, AI will have the greatest effect by removing repetitive tasks, streamlining workflows, improving decision-making, and allowing employees to spend more time on higher-value work. For Coda, that means continuing to train its employees and building or adopting the appropriate technologies.
We are already applying this approach to webstore onboarding. Autonomous agents process an app-store link, extract app data, generate visual assets, structure the product catalogue, and configure local payment options. A process that previously required weeks of engineering, design, and localisation work can now produce a configured storefront within minutes, with little human intervention in standard cases. AI is most effective when it is assigned a discrete task with a clear measure of success. We don’t ask it to do everything; we use it to address specific operational bottlenecks.
AI could also create new commercial models. Many services rely on subscriptions, which do not suit every customer. Local payment methods and flexible pricing, already used to sell digital content, could provide other ways for consumers to access AI services.
Technology will continue to evolve, but our focus will remain on investing in our people, giving them the right tools, and creating an environment in which they can do their best work. Companies won’t succeed simply by adopting AI quickly; they will need to combine skilled employees with the right technology to solve real problems for customers.
