Stripe Tour: Launching Payments Products to Sustain Growth

Since its founding 15 years ago, Stripe has gone on to revolutionise the ways businesses process payments with a string of innovative solutions. As technology has evolved with increased rapidity, Stripe has kept pace, launching products and services to help businesses focus on what matters most: the customer. 

Now, Stripe services a range of industries with its payments capabilities. Stripe President and Co-founder John Collison, says: "Among startups, we’re thrilled to power leading AI companies, including OpenAI, Mistral, Perplexity and Anthropic.

"And, of course, the UK is known for its strength in AI, and we’re proud to support most of its leaders, including ElevenLabs, Synthesia, PolyAI, Veed.io, Humanloop, Context.ai and many many more.

"And at the other end of the continuum, we’ve seen substantial growth in our enterprise segment. We’re partnering with leading UK companies such as Octopus Energy, ITV, Hargreaves Lansdown and Nando’s.

"And they’re joined by lots of global enterprises who are building on Stripe like Amazon, Hertz and Maersk."

At Stripe Tour London 2024, Stripe showcases its latest product launches, outlining how its payments capabilities can help UK businesses achieve crucial growth. 

“Stripe only grows when all of you grow,” notes John. 

Stripe launches open banking in the UK

To help its customers grow, Stripe has taken its first foray into open banking in the UK, launching Pay by Bank. The low-cost, real-time payments option enables customers to pay directly from their bank account, helping businesses reduce payments costs and improve cash flow.

In the UK, Pay by Bank is already being leveraged by online car marketplace Cinch and leading insurance brokerage AJ Gallagher to reduce payment costs and improve cash flow. 

Ruhi Dang, Head of EMEA Product at Stripe, says: “With Pay by Bank, businesses can now toggle on all of these payment methods directly from the Stripe dashboard.

“But how do you know which payment to show to which customer? This is where AI comes into play,” Ruhi continues. 

“Our models are trained on millions of businesses and trillions in cumulative payment volume present the right payment method at the right time to your customers to maximise your conversion. 

“They take into account things like location, currency, device type, browser, transaction amount, even subtle things like commerce patterns in your sector or the past buying behaviour of that consumer.”

The benefits of leveraging Pay by Bank are clear, resulting in a 3% uptick in conversion and a 7% increase in average transaction volume. 

Stripe Capital: Unlocking access to funding for businesses 

Stripe has also announced the launch of Stripe Capital in the UK, enabling SMBs to get access to flexible financing, helping them invest in their own expansion. 

The solution uses a company’s transaction and business history on Stripe to proactively qualify them for funding. Once approved, funds hit accounts the next business day, and businesses repay the amount as they earn.

Stripe Capital has led to significant success already in the US, helping SMBs grow revenue 114% faster than their peers, with the smallest businesses seeing revenue growth of 140% more than peers.

Alex Vogenthaler, GM for Payments, Connect, Global and Consumer at Stripe, says: “For UK businesses that draw in marketplaces or platforms on Connect, they’ll be able to use Stripe Capital later this year to offer financing to their sellers. 

“Whether that's to help them buy new equipment, grow their staff, upgrade their customer experience or invest in marketing, all of this will help them grow their own business.”

Alongside its latest suite of product launches in the UK, Stripe is expanding its in-person presence in the market, opening a new flagship office in the City of London to house its expanding teams in engineering, sales, partnerships and operations.

The latest Stripe product launches in the UK come as Stripe announces plans to unbundle its core payments offering from its broader tech stack.

Will Gaybrick, President of Product and Business at Stripe says: "Over the past few years, we've quietly made several Stripe services work well with other PSPs, and now we're taking this one step further. We're extending our modularity to the very core of Stripe payments processing.

"We recently launched our Vault and Forward API so that you can use even more Stripe with other payments processors. Businesses can now use our optimised checkout suite with other PSPs."

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