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CEO and co-founder Patrick Collison said the latest move is to make the company more modular so clients can ‘use just the parts of Stripe most useful to them’.
Stripe has made a major change to its business by allowing customers to use some of its services without needing to be a client of its main payments platform.
Unveiling a spate of new features and updates at its annual user conference yesterday (24 April), Stripe said that three of its most widely used products dealing with checkouts, billing and fraud prevention will now be available to companies processing payments with other providers.
This is a huge shift from the fintech’s previous business model, where customers would have to sign up to its flagship payments platform to avail of its growing list of other fintech services such as risk and verification, billing and invoicing, in-person payments and financial account data.
Stripe described this approach as an “all-or-nothing” proposition that cut off a chunk of potential users from onboarding to its platform, such as large enterprises that are unable to breach existing long-term contracts.
“Today, we’re extending our modularity to the very core of Stripe: payments processing,” said Will Gaybrick, Stripe president of product and business. “Going forward, helping our users manage the complexity of running multiple processors will be a major investment area for us.”
‘Putting AI to work’
The Irish-founded company dually headquartered in Dublin and San Francisco is the biggest private player in the payments space. In recent years, speculation has been growing around a potential IPO. It was valued at $65bn in February and raised $694m in a stock sale earlier this month.
Other than de-coupling payments from its platform, Stripe also announced a host of AI upgrades to its services, including to its Optimised Checkouts Suite – where AI will determine which payment methods to show for each customer. Stripe Radar, its fraud prevention service, will also get a new AI assistant that businesses can use to draft new fraud rules.
“The rules can then be tested against previous payments to see if they block fraud without increasing false positives, and boost revenue,” the company wrote.
Stripe said that it processed more than $1trn in payments last year as CEO and co-founder Patrick Collison pursues a mission to “grow the GDP of the internet”.
“Our strategy is to listen carefully to the needs of the most sophisticated and innovative businesses in the world,” said Collison, who founded the company with his brother in 2010.
“This year, because of our scale, Stripe is well positioned to help our users deal with the increasingly complex payments landscape and put AI to work to drive growth. We’re also making Stripe more modular, so companies can use just the parts of Stripe most useful to them.”
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