Stripe is familiar to many of us as the brand on the contactless payment terminal we tap in-store or on the payment page of an online service. But there's much more to Stripe than just another digital payment processor. Founded by two Irish entrepreneurs in 2010, the venture-funded startup now processes over $1 trillion in annual payments and is currently valued at a colossal $70 billion. It is building an impressive roster of enterprise customers, from digital leaders such as Airbnb, Amazon, Atlassian, OpenAI and Uber, to long-established names including BMW, Ford, Le Monde, Maersk and River Island.
This growing enterprise adoption is driven by a recognition of the importance of digital commerce, where many organizations have built up a patchwork of tactical billing and payment systems over the years and need a more modern e-commerce infrastructure. Eileen O'Mara, Chief Revenue Officer at Stripe, says:
When you get to a checkout your payment has to be absolutely frictionless, and enterprise wants to be at the heart of that. They don't want to be disrupted. That's one of the major drivers that we're seeing in our enterprise space as we're rolling out our enterprise business.
We've got over 100 customers now that are doing over a billion dollars on the platform, and [there's a] huge flow of funds on the Stripe platform. The very heart of that is that they're driven by their users, and they want to own the entire experience. I think it is a big shift that we're seeing.
One example is European energy supplier EDF, which turned to Stripe to give customers more convenient payment options, such as being able to pay their energy bills from the mobile wallet on their phone. Shivani Jha, Debt Prevention and Payments Lead at EDF, spoke at a recent event hosted by Stripe in London. She explained that this meant connecting Stripe into several different systems to provide a more streamlined experience:
We had a customer billing platform, obviously we had a My Account layer, the online account layer and the app. All of these needed to interact with each other and then Stripe needed to interact with all of these as well. Traditionally we were [set up as] a payment gateway, then an acquirer, so there were lots of parties involved. This transformation felt like an amazing opportunity to streamline all of this.
Checkout and multi-party payment processing is at the heart of Stripe's offering -- including recent innovations such as direct bank payments via open banking -- provided as a SaaS service that developers can plug into their websites and mobile apps using an API. Around this core, the portfolio has expanded over the years to include capabilities such as anti-fraud tools, tax calculation, subscription management, finance plans and identity verification, while last week saw the acquisition of global merchant-of-record provider Lemon Squeezy. Enterprises can even plug these ancillary capabilities -- what Stripe calls its Revenue Financial Automation suite -- into other Payment Service Providers (PSPs) rather than having to use Stripe's own PSP service.
At wealth management firm Hargreaves Lansdown, adopting Stripe has made it possible to add new features to the payment process and improve the customer experience. Speaking at the same event, George Rodgers, Lead Product Manager at Hargreaves Lansdown, explained that the firm has always had a policy that customers can't top up their investment accounts using credit cards, to prevent trading on credit. But there was no reminder of this policy during the legacy checkout journey. After replacing that legacy system with Stripe, it became possible to let customers know why their payments were failing if they attempted to pay with a credit card. He went on:
Over the space of a few weeks, the numbers of transactions [being blocked] dropped off pretty much to zero, just because we were able to feed back the reasons for failure and change customer behavior as a result of it. It sounds like such a simple thing to do, but until Stripe made it easy for us to actually execute, it wasn't possible.
For automotive giant Ford, its FordPay digital wallet, powered by Stripe, is enabling new forms of direct relationships with vehicle owners alongside its traditional partnerships with its dealer network. Stuart Butler, Group Product Owner of FordPay, explained that this allows drivers to use FordPay to authenticate payments for anything from putting down a deposit on a vehicle to paying for EV charging -- or even reordering stock when digital sensors in a builder's van detect that supplies of screws, nails or bolts are running low. He particularly values the ability to quickly prototype new capabilities. He explained how one proposal to offer a weekly hire contract for electric vehicles was able to become a reality:
We worked directly with Stripe, and we did a [protoype] where in a week, the customer would pay 200 pounds flat fee, plus 25 pence for every mile over 200 miles they drive. So therefore it was a fixed cost and a variable cost. The variable costs would come from telematics. It was really a weekly subscription product to an electric vehicle...
We went from literally a 10-car pilot to a [multi-city] European rollout, because we could spin up a prototype with Stripe in three weeks, when we couldn't have built it on our platform in less than a year. So we like to play with Stripe to be able to create prototypes that we either get to work or fail quickly.
In addition to these big names, Stripe continues to serve smaller customers, and last week it extended its partnership with SMB accounting giant Sage. The company is proud of the breadth of the platform's appeal, as O'Mara explains:
Everything from the newest wave of technology, with the AI companies, Anthropic or OpenAI -- we're managing all their subscriptions on Stripe -- to your very traditional type of companies, who are also looking to reinvent themselves and transform their business. Obviously with that -- the flow of funds and the subscription management and the billing and invoicing, and the integration of that -- you can do it in one stack and do it seamlessly. That has been really transformational for a lot of companies, and it's an API-led model, as opposed to long implementations that we might be used to in our past lives...
Think about Stripe as a horizontal platform that fits into an infrastructure across every vertical. That's our ambition, to grow the GDP of the internet. That means that we want to serve everyone.
Stripe's approach to payments is similar to how Twilio packaged up communications as a set of composable APIs. All the functionality is exposed as APIs that are ready for developers to call as part of their web and mobile apps. With payment being such a fundamental component of the end-to-end process of doing business, it's no wonder that enterprises are keen to make payments as convenient and frictionless as possible. In doing so, they're also able to explore new business models and opportunities, as the likes of FordPay are showing. No wonder Stripe has grown so huge, with a growing number of enterprise customers coming on board.
