Stripe Surpasses US$1tn in Total Payments Volume for 2023

Leading fintech Stripe has in its annual letter for 2023 announced that its FY2023 total payments volume surpassed US$1tn for the first time.

This marks a significant milestone in Stripe’s growth to become a giant in the fintech arena.

Founded just 15 years ago, Stripe’s achievement in reaching US$1tn in total payments volume comes in a shorter period than PayPal managed to hit the milestone – which it achieved in 2021, 23 years after it was founded. 

Stripe: Reaching a significant growth milestone

With total payments volume up 25% from 2022, Stripe Co-founders Patrick and John Collison attribute the company’s growth to its enterprise business, the number of fast-growing startups adopting its products and the success of its billing and tax services.

The fintech’s success has also seen its valuation rise to US$65bn from US$50bn as a result of its latest completed tender offer.

Speaking to CNBC, Stripe President John Collison says: “We spent a lot of time focusing on that top-line growth. All of last year [people were] predicting all manner of doom and gloom, [but] so far consumer spending has held up really well.”

Indeed, the growth Stripe has achieved backs up John’s assessment of resilience in consumer spending. 

And, even though startup fundraising has decreased over the past year, Stripe’s sibling Co-founders have seen that new companies founded in 2022 are generating revenue at a faster rate than those established in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic. 

‘Obsessing’ over innovations at Stripe

Of course, what has powered Stripe’s success are the continued innovations it makes to its checkout suite. 

There are now over 100 optimisations for its checkout services. Even the smallest checkout change benefits from Stripe’s economies of scale, given it can amortise the fixed cost of complex improvements across more than US$1tn of transactions. 

Recent checkout innovations include new pre-built payment surfaces (Stripe Payment Links, Stripe Checkout) and flexible UI components (Stripe Elements) which offer seamless, efficient ways to set up high-converting flows. 

Such innovations present a checkout experience personalised to the end user based on the device they use, their location, language and the nature of the goods being purchased. 

And yet despite the significant growth these innovations have helped Stripe achieve, for John Collison, the fintech’s US$1tn milestone is just the beginning. 

He tells Fortune Magazine: “We are very early in the overall Stripe growth trajectory in the markets that we serve. 

“Just to put concrete numbers on it: We’re a trillion dollars in payment volume, and we’re very proud to have passed that milestone. 

“But, depending on how you define digital payments, it’s US$50tn-plus in total payment volume. So, we’re less than 2% of the overall digital payments market.”

Indeed, if 2% of the market represents US$1tn in payments volume for Stripe, there’s no telling just how high the fintech giant’s ceiling is. 

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