ANGELA JIANG: So, you've heard today everything that we're launching to grow revenue, reduce costs, and better help you serve your own customers. In today's talk, Katelyn and I are going to dive deep in to what we're launching for platforms and marketplaces to build embedded payments and finance businesses.

We're constantly working with platforms and marketplaces to help them solve the problems that they care about most. And we're ultimately in the business of helping platforms and marketplaces be successful. But being successful can be difficult. You have to change your business strategy constantly to adapt to changing customer preferences and market conditions, while simultaneously managing a complex tech stack. That's where Stripe comes in. At Stripe we solve the pain points of payment and revenue friction so that you don't have to. We give you access to enterprise scale at startup speeds.

Connect is Stripe's solution for platforms and marketplaces to build embedded payments and finance businesses. Connect powers over 13,000 platforms and marketplaces and enables over 8 million businesses around the world. It has been the market-leading solution in this space for over a decade.

Connect is built on top of Stripe's modular, flexible, and extensible infrastructure. This means when you build on Connect, you get access to global payments, embedded payments, and finance capabilities, and revenue and finance automation tools, straight out of the box.

At Connect, we are deeply inspired by what we hear from our customers and what you've told us is that you have four key pain points along your embedded payments and finance journey. First, you want to be able to seamlessly embed payments into your product. Second, you want to be able to increase and optimize your payments margin. Third, you want to be able to access merchant insights and better tools so that you can manage risk. And fourth, you want to be able to quickly resolve customer issues related to payments.

In this talk, we're going to cover how our roadmap addresses these four key pain points for platforms and marketplaces. We'll wrap our talk with a conversation with one of our own customers who will share some of the key lessons that he has in his embedded payments journey.

ANGELA JIANG: All right, let's go ahead—

KATELYN STEIN: Wait, Angela. My engineering team would definitely like me to mention that like with any plan, some of the things that we're going to talk about today are subject to change.

ANGELA JIANG: That's fair.

KATELYN STEIN: Okay, great. Now, let's get started by talking about embedding payments into your product.

Platforms and marketplaces spend tons of time and resources designing their product experiences. And when it comes time to embed payments, you want to get to market quickly with experiences that feel native, matching the look and feel of your brand. But with tons of projects on your roadmap, you don't have six months or three to four engineers to throw at the problem of embedding payments. So, eventually, you want to manage first in support, and you haven't built out the teams to own that yet either.

With our embedded components, you can now build a fully white-labeled experience in as little as eight weeks, with as few as one or two engineers rather than a whole team or two.

We've taken the experiences that we've crafted from years of feedback and iteration and empowered you to embed them directly in your apps. Embedded components let you skip MVP and go straight to market with a fully featured payments experience that feels completely native to your product. Each component is customizable to reflect your brand.

If you decide to have Stripe manage risk and support, you don't need to compromise your user experience in order to do so. You can offload risk management to Stripe and let your users resolve risk and verification issues directly from within your app.

You can rely on our risk models for ongoing detection, while leveraging prebuilt UIs that have been finely tuned to maximize good user conversion.

Today, we announced several new embedded components that you can now integrate with your product. From onboarding and notifications to account management and payouts, these are nine critical financial workflows that you no longer have to build from scratch. Whether you're brand new to payments or you're filling gaps in an existing payments integration, we also want you to be able to embed advanced payment workflows, with embedded components like local payment methods settings, giving your users access to 18 payment methods and the ability to manage their preferences with just a few clicks or apps, allowing you to easily embed integration with third-party tools or Tax, helping our users calculate, collect, and remit sales taxes.

We're also extending this functionality across the breadth of Stripe products, making it easier to expand into financial services beyond just payments. With embedded components, you can give your users access to capital loans, expense cards, and financial accounts. We're invested in making it easier than ever to embed payments and financial services with a great user experience in no time.

And it's been incredible to see how our customers have already taken advantage of embedded components regardless of where they're at on their payments journey. SaaS platform, MYOB, added embedded components to their existing integration, allowing them to effectively fill gaps in their user experience. This used to be incredibly expensive and time-consuming, but now you can launch much faster and keep your maintenance costs low.

ANGELA JIANG: Okay. So, now that you've built a payments experience, you now want to be able to increase and optimize your payments margin, but doing so can be pretty difficult. It's not only difficult because it's technically challenging to implement a payments pricing scheme, but it's also difficult because you want to be able to evaluate how that pricing scheme is working against your bottom line. So, we're making that easier for you by introducing no-code pricing tools.

With no-code pricing tools, you can now go into your Stripe Dashboard and build your own payments pricing scheme. You can create fixed, variable, and blended fee structures, and you can set pricing rules for different payment methods, geographies, and individual customers. Once you've created your payments pricing scheme within your Stripe Dashboard, we'll integrate all the rules that you've set and charge your customers the appropriate fees. There's nothing else you have to do.

Okay. So, once you've created your payments pricing scheme, you want to be able to evaluate how performant it is against your bottom line. But doing so can, again, be rather difficult. So, we're introducing margin reports to make that easier as well. With margin reports, you'll have the full visibility into your revenues and your costs. You'll see a breakdown of your revenue and cost at a platform, transaction, and customer level.

So, with pricing tools and margin reports, platforms and marketplaces can now design, implement, and evaluate their payments pricing strategies. Over the next couple of months, you'll see us add additional functionality into this area, including the ability to schedule pricing campaigns, give you greater visibility into your payments costs, and give you the ability to emulate Stripe sticker pricing. As we continue to advance in this area, you'll just find it easier than ever to be able to increase and optimize your payments margin.

KATELYN STEIN: So, once you've optimized your payments margin, you'll next want to take on managing risk. But risk is challenging for platforms and marketplaces. It's challenging because platforms and marketplaces have to manage risk for their users, not just their own direct business risk. So, when you take on managing risk, you have to solve some hard problems. How do you make sure that the accounts you're onboarding are actually legitimate? How do you monitor to make sure that an account on your platform isn't about to go out of business? Solving these problems is resource-intensive and really painful.

You've told us that you want more robust information from Stripe to help you better manage risk. So we're introducing fraud signals. Fraud signals help you identify potentially high risk merchants by leveraging data from across the entire Stripe network. Fraud signals include categories of fraud scores, fraud indicators that are contributing to each fraud score, and account-level analytics for disputes, declines, and refunds. With fraud signals, we're giving you more robust information to help you better manage risk.

You've also told us that you want to streamline your merchant risk operations. A key pain point is being able to collect additional information from your users to help verify them.

So, now, from within the Stripe Dashboard, you can actually go ahead and request that information from your users, including documentation and selfies in order to better verify their identities. With easier verification, you can now balance fast growth for your business with effective fraud mitigation.

You've also told us that once you've been able to identify whether a merchant poses a risk to your business, you want to have more controls to be able to take action. From the Stripe Dashboard, you'll be able to block bank accounts and debit cards if they're suspected to potentially be fraudulent. And this restriction applies across your entire platform. So, if you onboard more users that use the exact same bank account information, their payouts will automatically be blocked.

And you've also told us that you want to be able to take action programmatically. So, we're introducing the ability to restrict charges or payouts programmatically with the Risk Controls API, in addition to being able to do so from directly within the Stripe Dashboard.

Throughout this year and into next, we're going to continue expanding these tools. We're going to build more controls, including the ability to reject accounts with nonzero balances, set risk reserves, and adjust payout timing.

We're going to be servicing recommended risk actions, and we're going to be enabling proactive detection with notifications and alerts.

We want you to be able to access more insights and tools to help you better manage risk, so that you can balance growing your business with effective risk mitigation.

ANGELA JIANG: And lastly, you told us you want to be able to quickly resolve customer issues when it's related to payment support. For a lot of platforms and marketplaces, it makes sense to offload payment support directly to Stripe. This helps you launch faster or just manage your business more efficiently. While this is typically pretty cost-effective, it can mean a reduction in transparency in the customer support journey because the customer is now traversing two parties: Stripe and the platform itself. Well, this year, we're completely changing that. We're giving platforms and marketplaces the ability to follow their customers through the entire support journey by giving them access to Stripe customer support cases.

Now, in the Stripe Dashboard, you'll be able to see the support cases for your customers for the last 90 days. You'll be able to view individual conversations that your customers are having directly with Stripe support. And crucially, you'll be able to assist your customers in getting unblocked by reaching out to Stripe on their behalf and providing supporting documentation or additional context.

We recently gave this feature to ecommerce platform WooCommerce, and they absolutely loved it. They said they were able to finally see the ability for their customers to interact directly with Stripe, and again, give them that end-to-end view of their customer journey. It's helped their teams become more efficient and it's helped their customers just get back quickly to selling online.

So, in today's talk, you heard about the four key pain points that our roadmap is solving for platforms and marketplaces on their embedded payments and finance journey. We want to extend a huge thank you to all of our customers for sharing their feedback and for building with us. We are ultimately in the business of helping make all of you successful. We want to enable you to solve the problems that you care about for your customers.

As part of that conversation, so many of you to have told us that it's really important for you to be a one-stop shop for your customer's needs. Well, Stripe is here to help with that as well. Across our broad portfolio suite, we offer all capabilities you'll need to become the one-stop shop that you would want to be. Whether that's unifying omnichannel payments or providing access to financing or enabling advanced money movement cases, Stripe is here to help you build whatever you want to build.

So, now, Katelyn is going to have a conversation with one of our customers. He is the head of commercial at Squarespace, and he's had decades of experience building really successful embedded payments businesses. Please help me in welcoming Dan Chandre to the stage.

KATELYN STEIN: Hey, Dan. Awesome. Thank you, Dan, for joining us.

DAN CHANDRE: Thank you, Katelyn.

KATELYN STEIN: So, we talked about how we align our roadmap with our customer needs. How does that approach resonate with what you're working on at Squarespace?

DAN CHANDRE: Yeah, I mean, a lot of it resonates. I think one of the things I saw this morning that I don't know that Stripe took enough credit for, that I wanted to call out, there was a slide at one point where, and I forget who was presenting, showed the different historical iterations of Connect that there were Standard and Express and Custom. And then, there was a slide that just showed Connect. That was my dream come true. That meant everything. There was so much that we were trying to navigate between the different capabilities on different things that were offered. So, that alone was something I've been trying to work with Stripe on for many years. I was so happy to see that come to fruition.

But then the next one I'd say right in line with that is what you were talking about today with embedded components. I think embedded components resonate with us because we know the level of effort that goes into creating these interfaces for our customers, and being able to eliminate that. And it gives us the opportunity to obviously move quicker, but it gives us the opportunity to experiment a little bit [and] make quick iterations. I will say, as much as I love embedded components, they're also incredibly frustrating for me because it seems right after I build an interface, the embedded component comes out and I'm just sitting there going, “God,” it's because I asked for that that you get. But no, in all seriousness, I think in a few different iterations of building a completely white-label payment solution where we've built those interfaces, our journey on that path isn't done.

So, for example, at Squarespace, we just launched Squarespace Payments in October of 2023. We've been ramping [up] that solution. And most of the interfaces we built ourselves. We did use a hosted onboarding, but our plan had always been to move from hosted onboarding to our own custom onboarding. Well, we've pivoted, right? Now, we can move from hosted onboarding to embedded onboarding. So, that's a great example of how even though we've already had a solution, we don't want to consider that like a corner we've painted ourselves into. We still want to leverage the embedded components.

And then, Squarespace Payments on the Squarespace platform is really our first step. We also have other distinct platforms that we own and operate like Acuity Scheduling and Talk, where we plan to bring Squarespace Payments into that fold. I don't want to build that interface all over again. Now, I can leverage the embedded components.

KATELYN STEIN: Yep. And we hear that from users all the time. Especially, I'm glad you called out onboarding. Onboarding in particular is so challenging. We showed it in the keynote this morning in more detail, but especially as you're expanding internationally, there's more and more requirements that you have to be able to collect. And so, onboarding has been a big one for users to not have to build themselves.

Awesome. So, in your experience, scaling successful payments business at Booker, at Mindbody, and now at Squarespace, what do you think platforms and marketplaces who are embedding payments often underestimate?

DAN CHANDRE: This is a great question because I think embedded payments as a concept for a lot of vertical SaaS or just SaaS in general is a bit of a shiny object in its first concept to people who really understand the impact that can have on the business. But what I've experienced, one of the biggest underestimating that I've done is the requirement for what I would call organizational alignment. Because everybody in this room, and maybe nobody outside of this room in their organizations, is deeply embedded in this space.

For example, at Mindbody, payments was a utility that was primarily used to drive revenue. At Squarespace, it was a utility that was a necessity. And so, born in the DNA of both these companies wasn't a deeply rich and embedded payment experience that could drive incremental customer value. So, you have to somewhat become a salesperson of this for your SaaS business.

I'll never forget at Squarespace, my CFO asking me, “Well, when is payments done?” And I said, “Well, what do you mean?” He's like, “When is the investment done?” I'm like, “It doesn't work that way.” And so, having to lay out the ongoing need to continue to iterate and improve in all of that, you have to educate because the DNA in this room is not always a DNA in SaaS companies at broad. So, that organizational alignment is not only a one-time, “get approval to build your embedded payment solutions” [thing], it's ongoing. So, after we launched Squarespace Payments, I'm back on the road show talking about launching Squarespace Capital, and I'm back on the road show talking about what the next thing can be. And the more organizational alignment you have, the better your go-to market is, the better your customer penetration will be, all of that. So, you have to become the champion of embedded, both payments, finance, all of that within your company.

KATELYN STEIN: Yep. That's a great one.

DAN CHANDRE: I mean, that's one. Other things that I think we've underestimated is in certain organizations, especially at Squarespace, for example… There's not a lot of, I'd say person-to-person customer touchpoints of urgency. We offer support, but we're not on the phone with them. We're supporting their website, which is critical to what they're doing, but not hypercritical, is what I could say. Once you are part of the transaction, you have transitioned to hypercritical. And so you have to shift to what I call like an always-on mentality, both from a support and engineering perspective. If you're a non-mission critical SaaS platform, and I don't say that in any sort of negative way, but how somebody lives and breathes their business, and then you add payment, you're shifting your dynamic with that customer, and you are of different consequence now. So, you have to think about that. You have to staff accordingly, and you have to have a model that really accommodates that.

I would say the other thing is what I mentioned kind of that conversation that I was having with our CFO, which is that, as you scale a payment stack, the need to staff that comes with it. And that has to do with both just general scalability issues, customer growth, all of that. It's not this one-and-done experience.

And I think that sometimes that is grossly underestimated in how you need to build in what is the expense side of this business to offset what I would call hopefully the revenue side, but more importantly the customer side of the business.

KATELYN STEIN: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And how do you think about scaling? Like, you're starting out and you kind of have staffing at a certain level, but how do you think about that scaling?

DAN CHANDRE: Well, you have to think about scalability first. I think the problem that a lot of companies get to is they're very focused at getting something in market, right? The challenge is, let's get to market. Even if you look at some of the selling points of embedded components, it's get to market in eight weeks. Well, that's great. What happens once you're in market? And if you start that planning at the wrong stage, you're not going to have a really solid three to five year financial plan that implicates the cost that it takes to build all of this.

So, if you don't start at scale, or at least scale thinking, it's going to be a negative experience internally for you as an operator as you go on. So, it's really about building that scale into the overall thesis of what you're trying to build and doing that from the beginning. It's great to leverage partners on what that scale could be, but also leverage the industry. It's great opportunity to speak to others who have done it, to see where their pitfalls are.

It's one of the things I gain most from opportunities like this, which is sitting down with other platforms. We always like to say we want to get all the platforms in a room without Stripe and then bring Stripe in so we can tell them all the conspiratorial things we've come up with. But it's also to say, what are you dealing with right now? And so, I know this is a little bit of a tangent from just about scalability, but there's a lot of value in those who have tried to build this before. And the challenges, though, are unique and they're new, and we're seeing new things in fraud. So, I think building a community of also payment experts or payment platform experts is really valuable.

KATELYN STEIN: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And in that kind of like scaling and being operationally ready, one of the things we talked about a bit today was risk. I would love to hear a little bit about how you've thought about risk operations.

DAN CHANDRE: Yeah, I've thought too much about risk operations, unfortunately.

So, I have two very distinct experiences with risk operations.

When I came to Mindbody, we had a risk group. And so, they were a high-functioning, really an excellent group that was really strong on the merchant fraud side. And so it was really how I cut my teeth learning about what that organization needs to look like. But at least there was a DNA within the organization about what risk tolerance was within the organization, and then the necessity to protect yourself against bad outcomes.

Squarespace, on the other hand, which had no real, what I would call “payments DNA” throughout the organization, had no risk group. So, we had to build it from scratch. And that was a very different experience because risk scales with volume. And so this is a really tricky one where you're going to see things as your volume scales that you didn't see or plan for in the beginning. And there's a decision to be made as a platform of do you want to build this or not?

And I think, I want to go back to my Connect block comment. This is a great evolution of Stripe, where picking and choosing the components of Connect that you wanted to use previously was not possible. And so, you had to be down a very particular path if you wanted to do Stripe-managed risk. And if all the boxes didn't fit what you were looking for, that didn't work. So, I applaud Stripe now that that has been opened up. If I could have done it over just at Squarespace, I probably would've started there. I probably would've started saying, “Stripe, why don't you manage risk as we scale?” Because I want to build a risk org for scale, and the signals change over time. And, but again, we get that timing issue of, like, at what time were we ready to go versus not?

But I think one of the things that is really exciting about this field is there is a lot of new technology in this area that is helping us to identify nefarious merchants up front or bad actors up front and what we can do. And then, Stripe gives us enough tools throughout the funnel of acceptance payout to mitigate signals that we may see along the path. But it's an ever-changing, ever-challenging world that I wish I didn't participate in as much as I do.

KATELYN STEIN: Yep, yep. Yeah, there really is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to risk and you've gotta be ready to scale. So, that's great. Awesome. So, what myths would you like to dispel for anyone here who is looking to embed payments in their product experience?

DAN CHANDRE: Yeah, I love this one. There [are] a lot of myths to dispel. I think the first one, and this one I think is just top line, the most important myth to dispel about embedded payments, and that is that it's about revenue. I think if you're a SaaS company and you're simply saying, ”We need to increase our revenue and we're going to do it through embedded payments,” you've already lost. That makes no sense. If embedding payment solves an identifiable customer problem or improves a customer experience or allows you the pathway to offering products that are what your customer is looking for, then you're on the right path.

But I have way too many times seen companies that are just [saying], “We want to go from a rev share over here where we get 40 basis points,” “We want to go to 80 basis points, so we're going to embed payments.” That's not a good enough reason, sorry. You're going to spend easily that amount of money to build that organization, to build this muscle, to implement all of this, just to drive some top-line revenue, and it's not going to deliver value.

What we saw at Squarespace was we wanted to deliver an experience that was germane to the platform that they're spending their time in, as opposed to making them go to different places to reconcile. We wanted that to be in the platform that they're using day to day. And then, we wanted to stick to who we are as a company. [At] Squarespace, one of our models [is] that we believe in a world where everyone can be an entrepreneur. And so, what does that mean for an individual to be an entrepreneur? We believe it has a lot to do with their growth, their ability to find a space where they can actually exhibit whatever their dream is. But then, we have to be the platform that helps them scale that.

So, when I think about the role then that payments plays in that, it's that we want to be the one that's closest to helping them not only pull their money from the activity in which they're driving, but then grow that money through things like instant payouts for access to capital or maybe capital to help them grow their business. But we don't have any control of that when it's all outside of our platform. We want to use the signals that we receive from our customers on their, let's say we're monitoring their order growth over time, and we starting to see an inflection in how successful they are in whatever they're selling, that could be a service, it could be a good. That could be an indicator to us that that's the time that they need working capital and we offer them capital in a way that can help them grow their business.

We can also see a variety of trends in this data now that it's internal to our platform, that we can give them all of their kinds of signals of products that we offer, whether that be a campaign product or a digital content product, to help them grow their business. But once we pulled the transaction into the platform, that's why we're doing it.

So, that went all the way back to the myth of dispelling that it's about revenue. Because at the end of the day—and this is the part that I would not tell my CFO—if I were to fully balance sheet this out, I don't know that it's revenue accretive for us. I don't. That's not the point. The point is it's a better and sticky experience. One that's gonna help our customers grow, and that's why we're in business. So, that's one myth I would dispel.

The other one I think there are a variety of SaaS companies that get into embedded payments because it's the hot thing. This reminds me of when everybody wanted to be a payfac and they had no idea what that meant. And like going to summits, they love to label themselves fintech, no offense to anybody in the crowd, but it's a lot of jargon and jargon just doesn't matter at the end of the day because jargon is not how you got your embedded or your installed customer base. It's not. You got there because there was a distinct thing you did for that customer that you're better at than your competition. And so that's why you should be doing these things. Let that drive your reason for embedding payments. Don't do it because the street thinks you should, or your investors think you should because you get a tick on your multiple because you can say you're in fintech. I think that's a really, just, that's the wrong reason to do it.

And the only other myth I would dispel is that question of it's a one-time spike. We're going to do this and it's going to take us nine months and we'll be done. I can't get away from that conversation because it's just not. You have to make sure that this becomes part of your DNA and you're making that type of investment as an organization. So, it's not an offshoot, it's not a side project, it's not a lark. It's gotta be part of your core value prop that you're delivering to your customers.

KATELYN STEIN: Yep. That makes a lot of sense. And it's really common. We see it a lot from new platforms and marketplaces, “It's a spike and then we'll be done.” It's not going to be done. Awesome. Dan, we love asking our users, if you had a magic wand, what is one thing that you would wish for from Stripe?

DAN CHANDRE: That's a dangerous question. How much time do we have? No, I'm just kidding. So, the interesting thing here, I feel like in the last three years maybe or so working with Stripe, I have had the opportunity to try to do just that and have had surprising amount of success.

So, and I mean that wholeheartedly, that I think Stripe, what I've seen last year and this year through Sessions and other areas of what you've dedicated engineering resources and time to are what you're hearing from your customers. I do, I honestly believe that.

And one of the example I'll call out and where I would wave my wand is something that all the way back to my Mindbody days that was really, I was really interested in is that Stripe has historically operated as a closed ecosystem. And I understand why. It makes perfect sense, right? But at the same time, that's like a purist approach as if our platforms were built that way. A lot of our platforms, we started with one process or PSP and moved to another and moved to another, and now we're building our future with Stripe, but we still have all of this, right? And so for Stripe to embrace the idea of what you're doing with Vault and Forward [API] is really interesting to me. But if I could wave my magic wand, that would be true across the platform and data moving in both directions.

And what I mean by that is, when I look at Stripe Capital as an opportunity, I would love to reference third-party data into Stripe Capital to make broader lending decisions. Because not all of our customers drive all of their GMV through our platform. So, I want to say, here's who you are as a merchant and let's make a capital offer based on that, not just your Stripe volume.

So, that would be my magic wand I think if, I mean, I've got a long list, as many know, but I've been most pleased with the fact that a couple waves of that wand have come true.

KATELYN STEIN: Awesome. Yeah, I love that. There's a lot of opportunity to leverage the network and hopefully, we'll be able to tap into that and we'll be talking about some of that at Sessions 2025.

Well, Dan, thank you so much for this insightful conversation. This has been great. And for platforms and marketplaces in the audience today, we hope this conversation has been valuable and we hope your look at our roadmap has been valuable. If you'd like to see some of the things that we preview today, please stop by the platforms and marketplaces demo desk downstairs. But otherwise, thank you for coming.

DAN CHANDRE: Thank you.