Stripe acquires India’s Recko to offer payments reconciliation

21 Oct 2021

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Recko’s payments reconciliation software will add to Stripe’s increasing breadth of offerings and global acquisitions.

In a bid to expand its services, Stripe has made its first acquisition in India with payment reconciliation software start-up Recko.

Based in Bangalore, Recko helps online businesses reconcile their payments by comparing two or more sets of records and automating the accounting process to find discrepancies and provide a comprehensive picture of a company’s financial health.

Recko’s software is especially relevant to fast-growing online companies that process thousands or millions of transactions each month. It helps them to account for complex transactions such as currency conversions, refunds, chargebacks and bundled bank deposits.

“Payments reconciliation shouldn’t be a mild headache that balloons into a migraine as a company grows – it should be an easy, highly automated process,” said Will Gaybrick, Stripe’s chief product officer.

The company was founded in 2017 and has since grown to bag some big clients such as food-delivery app Deliveroo, Indian e-commerce site Meesho and online medical store PharmEasy. Stripe did not disclose financial terms of the acquisition.

“Joining Stripe is a perfect next chapter for Recko, and we can’t wait to help grow the GDP of the internet by removing the burden of reconciliation complexity,” said Recko co-founder and CEO Saurya Prakash Sinha.

“Internet businesses need new financial tools that can scale with their growth and automate the tasks required to produce an accurate picture of their financial health.”

Stripe’s expansion

For Stripe, this marks the San Francisco-headquartered fintech’s first acquisition in India. According to the company, it has been increasing its investment in the country with updated data locality architecture and rapid local hiring.

Since its founding in 2009 by Irish brothers John and Patrick Collison as a payment processing start-up, the now $95bn company has been expanding its offerings rapidly. Earlier this year, it announced plans to acquire Boston tax software outfit TaxJar and California-based fraud detection start-up Bouncer.

June saw the release of Stripe Identity, an AI-powered tool for verifying a person’s identity in a payment transaction, and Stripe Tax, a tool to calculate and collect VAT and sales taxes.

Earlier this month, it was reported that Stripe is edging into the cryptocurrency space, hiring a small, experienced team of crypto engineers three years after dropping bitcoin.

With the acquisition of Recko, Stripe will now be able to offer its customers automated payments reconciliation services.

“Stripe helps millions of businesses around the world streamline their revenue management – from subscriptions and invoicing to revenue recognition and bookkeeping,” said Gaybrick. “With Recko, we’ll automate their payments reconciliation, a critical input into their overall financial health.”

Stripe said Recko will join its remote engineering hub to help build and scale its products globally. The remote hub was announced in 2019 to supplement its existing hubs in San Francisco, Seattle, Singapore and Dublin.

“We are doing this to situate product development closer to our customers, improve our ability to tap the 99.74pc of talented engineers living outside the metro areas of our first four hubs,” Stripe CTO David Singleton said at the time. “Our users are everywhere. We have to be, too.”

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Vish Gain is a journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com