Stripe enables businesses in many countries worldwide to onboard easily so they can accept payments as quickly as possible. Stripe’s scale makes our platform a common target for payments fraud and cybercrime, so we’ve built a deep understanding of the patterns bad actors use. We take these threats seriously because they harm both our users and our ecosystem; every fraudulent transaction we circumvent keeps anyone impacted from having a bad day.

Today, we’re happy to officially launch Stripe in Malaysia. Businesses all across the country can now easily accept and manage payments, and access the full Stripe stack including Billing, Connect, Radar and Sigma.

Stripe launched in Singapore in 2016. Since then, we’ve seen strong traction, and are proud to work with some of the fastest-growing companies in the region, including Grab, Mobike, and Carousell. Today, we’re increasing our investment: we’re very excited to announce that Singapore is joining Seattle, Dublin, and San Francisco to become Stripe’s fourth global engineering hub.

Stripe is now generally available for businesses in eight additional European countries. Businesses in Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Greece, and Portugal can now sign up and use the full Stripe stack.

As part of Stripe’s environmental program, we fully offset our greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing verified carbon offsets. Starting this year, we’re going a step further. In addition to our offset program, we are committing to pay, at any available price, for the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and its sequestration in secure, long-term storage. We’re announcing this commitment to solicit technology partners and to urge other companies to follow suit.

Platforms and marketplaces like RVshare, Lugg, and Qwick use Stripe Connect to onboard and pay their owners, movers, and hospitality professionals. Building a great experience for these people and businesses is key to a platform’s success, and we’ve consistently heard that user onboarding is one of the most difficult challenges platforms face. Based on user feedback and analysis of thousands of Express accounts, we made a number of updates to the Connect onboarding flow that drove a 5.3% average increase in conversion rates.

DNS is a critical piece of infrastructure used to facilitate communication across networks. DNS issues can quickly lead to crippling, widespread outages, and you could find yourself in a real bind. Here's how we monitor our DNS systems and how we used an array of tools to investigate and fix an unexpected spike in DNS errors that we encountered recently.

Stripe uses machine learning to respond to our users’ complex, real-world problems. Machine learning powers Radar to block fraud, and Billing to retry failed charges on the network. Our machine learning infrastructure scores hundreds of millions of predictions across many machine learning models. Over time, the volume, quality of data, and number of signals have grown enormously. Here we discuss Railyard and our lessons on building and operating machine learning infrastructure.

Stripe has engineering hubs in San Francisco, Seattle, Dublin, and Singapore. We are establishing a fifth hub that is less traditional but no less important: Remote. We are doing this to situate product development closer to our customers, improve our ability to tap the 99.74% of talented engineers living outside the metro areas of our first four hubs, and further our mission of increasing the GDP of the internet.

Since our launch last April, we've seen a wide range of businesses use Stripe Billing to manage their recurring revenue and send invoices, including European businesses like Deliveroo, Front, Channel 4, Shadow, and Typeform. Today, we're launching new features for Stripe Billing to help recurring revenue businesses in Europe expand internationally and minimise the impact of upcoming Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) regulatory requirements.

Starting in September, new regulatory requirements called Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) will be rolled out for businesses who have customers in Europe. SCA is a pillar of the EU’s second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) and will require two-factor authentication on most payments made by European customers in an effort to decrease online fraud. Complying with SCA will be complex, as it will be implemented differently by individual banks and payment providers across Europe. And beyond the compliance burden, these new rules will also come with a cost—the new authentication step can add friction to checkout, reducing conversion.