Sessions 2023: Powering growth for the internet economy

Jeff Titterton Marketing
Sessions 2023 > Hero

Today, we held our annual user conference, Stripe Sessions, in person for the first time since 2019. You can now watch the keynote on demand. In the keynote we discussed the current and future state of technology and the online economy, and what Stripe can do to help companies drive more revenue growth and operate more efficiently. We went deep on how we can help businesses in three core areas, and shared some of our newest product developments in each:

1. Helping users to increase their revenue with our global payments suite

We discussed how businesses on Stripe can increase revenue by an average of 10.5% with our checkout optimizations (including Link, our one-click checkout experience), unify their customer experiences across channels with Terminal, and get access to advanced payments capabilities and ML optimizations. Here’s some of the latest:

Checkout optimizations

Unified commerce

  • Our in-person payments capabilities now support new use cases with the launch of Stripe Reader S700, an Android-based smart reader designed by Stripe that works for handheld or countertop needs. 
  • We also support Tap to Pay on compatible mobile devices, so users can capture in-person payments with no additional hardware required.

Payments performance

  • We’ve shipped the Enhanced Issuer Network to reduce fraud and boost authorization rates.
  • We support network tokens for Visa and Mastercard volume to improve acceptance rates in all Stripe markets.
  • Our real-time card account updater reduces declines for Visa and Mastercard volume globally.
  • We introduced Asynchronous Capture to reduce latency by 300 to 800ms.
  • Regional debit network routing access is now available in the US, Canada, France, and Australia.

2. Enabling platforms and fintechs to get to market faster and generate more revenue with embedded finance

We shared how and why platforms are using Stripe Connect to unlock new revenue streams by embedding online payments, in-person payments, financial services, and more. Some recent ships in this area:

Payments for platforms

  • Connect embedded components allow platforms to quickly add prebuilt functionality like onboarding flows and dashboards natively in their product with just a few lines of code.
  • Stripe Apps for Platforms will soon enable Connect platforms to embed apps like Xero natively into their product.

Embedded finance

  • A new in-dashboard onboarding flow for Capital’s no-code integration option allows platforms to sign a Capital deal and deliver an offer in a matter of days—with no engineering time and no additional support from the Capital team.
  • We expanded Issuing card network support in the US, now including Mastercard in addition to Visa.

Global payouts

  • New tools enable businesses to start, run, and manage an Instant Payouts program with a faster integration process, streamlined monetization, and no-code build options.

3. Helping businesses save time and money across their developer and finance teams

We showed how we help users free up time with powerful developer tools like the new Workbench and the forthcoming Docs AI, which answers developers’ questions with concise summaries drawn from our documentation. We’re also saving our users time with our revenue and finance automation suite. More than 250,000 companies now use Stripe’s revenue and finance tools, and our automated revenue recovery features earned businesses an extra $3.8 billion in 2022. Updates in this area:

Billing and invoicing

Tax

  • The new Stripe Tax API lets businesses manage tax on any transaction, including those not processed by Stripe (available in 40+ countries).
  • Stripe Tax supports additional location-specific tax requirements such as the Chicago Lease Tax, the EU Import One Stop Shop (IOSS), and US location reports to make filing easy even with vastly different state filing requirements.

Reporting and data

  • Our new Revenue Reporting tool (beta) gives finance leaders a better snapshot of key business metrics, including monthly recurring revenue, customer growth by activity, and revenue by product, and provides automated financial statements for cash-accounting businesses.
  • Automatic reconciliation capabilities help businesses compare order-level data from their systems of record with Stripe transactions and bank deposits, providing clear visibility into cash collection and ensuring that accounts balance.
  • We shared a preview of the new AI-powered Sigma Assistant, which will soon enable users to pose natural-language questions about their Stripe data, and get back SQL queries they can run to find the answers.

Feedback from Stripe users has always formed the basis of our product roadmap, and the updates we shared today at Sessions reflect that. Each improvement represents a request from our users—a problem they identified as impeding their growth. We aim to deliver elegant solutions to these problems, so that our users can more easily build great businesses that grow the GDP of the internet.

For more about what’s next for the digital economy, for Stripe, and for our users, watch the keynote.

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