Stripe Sessions started a couple of years ago as an annual event to get together with its users and to showcase Stripe’s new products and features. Why is it important? Because as the most valuable fintech company in the U.S. with a $95 billion valuation, Stripe is setting the trends in the fintech world and Stripe Sessions is a great way to capture these trends. (Stripe is also the second-most valuable startup in the world.)
Stripe defines itself as a technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet. It is the mission to grow the GDP of the internet. Numbers are mind-blowing:
- 4000+ employees
- 14 global offices (San Francisco, Dublin, London, Paris, Singapore, Tokyo, and more.)
- Millions of companies in over 120 countries
- 173 billion API requests in the past 12 months (more than 5,000 per second)
Keynote of the event was delivered by Patrick Collison, co-founder & CEO of Stripe. He emphasized how Stripe was well-positioned to help a multitude of businesses adapt overnight to the pandemic. Since Stripe is working with all types of companies in the spectrum, from startups to some of the world’s largest companies, the magnitude of its impact is enormous.
Patrick Collison highlighted the impact of the pandemic over technology trends: “Overall, the pandemic represented a major acceleration to preexisting trends. We have jumped ahead by about five years. And these changes are sticking. Even as economies open up again, things aren’t going back to the way they were. New demographics, new sectors, and new geographies came online and they’re not going back.”
Since the last Stripe Sessions event, Stripe team has focused on developing tools and products to run an internet business easily. Stripe launched products on fraud, analytics, issuing cards, managing subscriptions, extending loans, and more.
- Stripe Tax: to track and collect taxes for business owners
- Stripe Identity: to help businesses verify their users’ identities and prevent attacks from fraudsters
- Stripe Capital: to allow businesses on Stripe to extend loans to their business customers
- Stripe Issuing in Europe: to enable European businesses to create new physical or digital cards
- Stripe Treasury: to allow platforms to embed financial services in their products and offer interest-earning accounts to their business customers
- Stripe Climate: to allow any business to contributed to carbon removal projects
Stripe also made a couple of acquisitions including TaxJar and, Bouncer to help with fraud and Paystack to build out payments infrastructure in Africa. All these acquisitions show Stripe’s commitment to be a truly global fintech company and also hint at new acquisitions.
It is pretty impressive that even though Stripe is a big corporation, it still acts like a startup. It defines the product roadmap based on users’ feedback and requests. At Stripe’s scale, it is a real challenge to keep the startup spirit. But somehow, Stripe is still preserving its startup culture.
In summary, Stripe Sessions revealed new products and features, and the company’s moves for becoming a global fintech giant. Here are the trends that we captured from the event:
- Embedded finance: We have started to see more startups that work on embedded finance to enable their customers to become a “fintech” business to generate revenue tied to financial services. Stripe is one of the pioneers in this space.
- Fintech & Climatetech: We’ll see more companies take initiatives on the climate crisis that we all face. Other fintech companies will follow in Stripe’s footsteps on this.
- More M&A Activity in Fintech: We’ll see more mergers and acquisitions in fintech. We predict that more consolidations are on the way (as long as they are in line with regulations).
