GARY PELLISSIER:  When Stripe was founded, back when we were /dev/payments, we set out to make it easy to accept payments on the internet. However, we quickly realized to be a great payments company, we needed to be a great payouts company as well. And that’s because many of our earliest users were multi-sided businesses—marketplaces and platforms who looked to coordinate payments with ultimately paying out their businesses and workers their earnings. 

So we built Connect. And early on, we partnered with Lyft to build a first-of-its-kind payout product that would allow Lyft drivers to access their earnings instantly, 24-7. Today, Connect powers more than 15,000 marketplaces and platforms around the world, who in turn make payouts to more than 10 million active Connected accounts. That’s millions of businesses, sellers, service providers, and creators who depend on Stripe and Connect for these payouts. 

However, over time, we heard from more users, not just marketplaces and platforms, that they were looking for Stripe to help power payouts. And so, I’d like to do a fun experiment here. I’d like to see the need for payouts in the room. So really quickly, with a show of hands, how many of you in the normal course of operating your business have ever paid out or sent money to a vendor or a third party? Okay. Yeah. That’s most of you. That’s what I was hoping to see. 

Let me share with you a little bit more about what we’re hearing from our other conversations with users. Insurance providers are looking for a fast and easy way to pay out their insurance claims. Ecommerce business leaders want their customers to be able to get access to refunds, rebates, and rewards instantly. Financial-service providers want to power payroll disbursements and withdrawals. And all businesses are looking for a way to pay out affiliates, vendors, contractors, and creators, as well as a whole host of third parties. 

These are all payouts. And so it’s with these needs, your needs, in mind, we’re launching Global Payouts, a standalone payout solution that unlocks your ability to directly and easily pay out to third parties around the world. And to make these payouts possible, we had to build a full suite of money management APIs and capabilities to allow you to: directly fund in more ways; store and convert currencies instantly; and to pay out to third parties globally, all on Stripe. 

One of the many reasons why we needed to build these money management capabilities is because many of you came to us with a problem that internally we refer to as the double FX problem. And double FX is exactly what it sounds like. It’s when you need to pay multiple FX fees when moving money around as a global business. Let me concretize this a little bit more. 

Let’s say you’re a US-based global business, and you accept payments in multiple currencies. Here, you’re accepting payments in dollars but also in euros. Being a global business, you also likely store currencies abroad as well. So as you see here, you have a UK bank account that’s denominated in pounds. But since you operate out of the US, you want to centralize and manage all of your funds in the United States. And in order to safely store those funds in your US bank account, you need to pay an FX fee on those euros and pounds. 

But again, you’re a global business, and so you likely have global liabilities needing to pay out in other currencies as well. So that’s when we get to the second leg here, where you make payouts to third parties. Boom, you’re hit with another FX fee on both transactions, whether it’s from your bank account or your third-party payout provider. Multiple FX fees and oftentimes days, if not weeks later, your recipients end up getting their money. 

This has made your global expansion ambitions much, much more complicated and expensive. And even if you’re operating domestically, your teams are still having to grapple with this problem. They have to coordinate across a constellation of payment processors, banks, and third-party payout providers just to make a payout. Often, they also have very little visibility into where your money is at any given time. This means it’s very difficult to manage a payouts program, and often the recipients aren’t able to understand where their money is and when they can expect it. 

We’ve heard you call this a nightmare. And now, starting today, here’s what this looks like on Stripe. This is already looking a lot more streamlined, right? And that’s because you can settle and store multiple currencies in the Stripe Dashboard, meaning you only need to FX if and when you need to, like paying out to a currency you don’t have here. But what this does mean is no more double FX, no more swivel-chair solutions between banks, payment processors, and third-party payout providers because now you can fund, store, and pay out directly from the Stripe Dashboard or via the Stripe API. You now have one unified solution to allow you to send money around the world. 

So let’s start with funding. We know that the ability to accept funds directly from your external bank account is important, not just from your payments balance. And this could be for a variety of reasons. You might not use Stripe as a payments processor, or you use multiple payment processors. You might want to segregate funds across different business lines and across different geographies for some period of time. Or you might be restricted from using payments funds for nonpayments use cases. 

And so now you can fund your Stripe storage balance directly from these external sources, completely independent from your usage of payments. What this means is you can do this in a variety of ways using, again, both the Stripe Dashboard and the API. You can either pull funds from your external bank account into this new balance, or you can tell your bank to push those funds into this balance. And of course, you can always access your Stripe payments balance and fund this balance as well. 

But once you’ve moved these funds into Stripe, you still need a place to store them. Many of you currently do use banks for this. And while banks are secure, setting up global or even domestic networks of banks can be difficult to set up and time consuming and then very complex to manage. There can be full teams at your businesses managing the fund flows between these different bank accounts. And so we’ve created one new, more powerful balance right in the Stripe Dashboard to allow you to hold your funds. 

This means you no longer need to stitch together this constellation of providers and bank accounts. And to ease security concerns for users in the United States, we’ve made these balances FDIC insurance-eligible. This gives you the peace of mind that banks do, directly from the Stripe Dashboard. And going back to the currency problem: what if you need to manage multiple currencies? Well, we’ve also given you the ability to convert and manage multiple currencies directly from the Stripe Dashboard. As I mentioned before, FX only if and when you need to. 

And so now we’ve reached the payout, the catalyst for building all of these other things that we just covered. And we built Global Payouts to be fully programmatic. What we mean by that at Stripe is you can make payouts either via the API in a fully customized way, or you can go live quickly using our no-code options directly from the Stripe Dashboard, sending one-off or recurring payouts. And we’re offering lightweight integration options like no-code payouts in hosted forms. And we’ve seen many businesses go live, if not in days, hours after starting. 

And with built-in integrations like Financial Connections and Link, you can verify your recipients instantly, which helps you reduce errors, improve payout success, and fend off fraudsters. In fact, businesses who use our hosted onboarding forms and Financial Connections see an 88% decrease in failed payouts compared with using manual information collection. That’s hours your teams don’t have to spend tracking down the status of a payout and then ultimately doing payout retries. 

And Turo, a user who you’ll hear from in just a moment, has experienced a 99.5% payout success rate when using Global Payouts. And we’re just getting started. As part of Stripe’s mission to increase the GDP of the Internet by building financial infrastructure, we’re going to continue to invest in Global Payouts and these money management capabilities in the months and years to come. 

For example, we’re going to start with offering accelerated funding, a way for you to more quickly get access to your funds in this new Stripe Dashboard balance. And we’re going to give you the ability to fund from multiple payment processors as well, directly. We’ll make it possible for you to fund, store, and pay out in more currencies, including stablecoin. And we’re going to make it possible for you to pay out to more countries, over 100 by the end of the year. We’re also going to expand to Europe, so both users in the US, UK, and Europe will be able to have access to Global Payouts. 

So what started as a payouts product has resulted in a full suite of money management capabilities that make running a global business less expensive, less time-consuming, and less complex, all on Stripe. You can say goodbye to things like double FX once and for all, with more ways to fund directly from an external bank account, the ability to hold multiple currencies in a more powerful FDIC-insured balance on Stripe, and the ability to pay out to recipients globally. 

And the best part is this product has been built to fully interoperate with all of Stripe’s existing products. What this means is you can use Global Payouts as a standalone product or in concert with other Stripe products like Stripe Connect. And so to put this into perspective, please join me in welcoming Matt, our marketplace sales lead, and the team from Turo, who will share a little bit more about how they use Global Payouts and Connect to build the world’s largest car share marketplace. 

MATT CORLEY: Thank you, Gary. And Josh, Shaa, thank you so much for joining us. Why don’t you introduce Turo and yourselves? 

JOSH SPERLING: Cool. Hey, everyone. I’m Josh. I’m the product lead for payments at Turo, the world’s largest car-sharing marketplace. Our team is primarily responsible for the payments and billing infrastructure that powers guest payments and host payouts, alongside a variety of other use cases around payment processing, compliance, and tax. 

SHAA ALAGUMUTHU: Hey, everyone. I'm Shaa. I'm the engineering lead for payments at Turo. As we speak, our business is operating in, like, 16,000 cities. And just to put some perspective on the scale, we process close to $3 billion annual payments volume. That's right. 

MATT CORLEY: Awesome. Well, both of you are tenured payments leaders and have been dealing with money management and payout evolutions over time. What would you say has been your most important realization over the recent years? 

JOSH SPERLING: Yeah, so I've had the opportunity to build a large variety of marketplaces, big and small, in different sectors. And I think the through line is that a lot of the payments infrastructure that we operate on today just wasn’t really built with marketplaces in mind. A lot of what we do is take existing solutions and try our best to tailor them and kind of fit a round hole into a square peg. A lot of that’s changing. 

So with the growth of the sharing economy, the gig economy over the last decade or so, products have been launched specifically for our use cases from Stripe and others, making it a lot easier to handle some of the needs of these marketplaces, such as more instant payouts and built-in compliance and tax into the tools that we’re using. 

SHAA ALAGUMUTHU: The most important thing is payments have to work, I think, without any issues for the buyers who are coming to the site. Also, in addition, there are expectations around—like the payments have to—the buyer has to see a lot of flexible ways to pay. And it has to be there’s a lot of convenience they need. And for the sellers on the site, they need a more reliable way to get paid, and very quickly as well. And also, for the people who are building the platform, I think it’s very important for them to have very abstracted payments capabilities so that they can quickly integrate and build go-to-market products on top of it. 

MATT CORLEY: Yeah, it sounds like, as a global marketplace, you need to build first-class experiences for both the buyer side and the supply side of your marketplace. I’m curious: Gary spoke about the double-FX problem, which obviously many businesses face here at scale. What has been Turo’s experience with double FX? And how do you all think about entering new markets? 

JOSH SPERLING: Yeah, so Turo operates internationally in five markets: US, Canada, France, UK, and Australia. And let’s use the example of a trip happening in Canada. So we’re a US company. We primarily operate in USD. For a trip taking place up north, you’ll have a guest paying in CAD. Typically, we would convert that to USD and then incur FX fees and then pay those funds immediately out to hosts and incur those FX fees again. 

At our scale, that’s a massive problem and something that limits our international expansion. So solving the double-FX problem and having the ability to access multiple currencies in our platform account for pay-ins and payouts is absolutely critical. 

SHAA ALAGUMUTHU: Yeah, I think the way we approach this is like a three-step thing. The first thing is to identify where the opportunity is. I think, for that, we need a holistic view of how the funds are really flowing in the platform, like where it is entering the system, where it is exiting the system, and where it is entering back if you have different line of business. And then trying to solve this problem in a more impactful way. 

So it depends on at what scale is your problem, at what scale you can really create an impact. What’s your international payments volume? And also, what kind of solution you are going to—I think this is where what Gary had talked about, the multicurrency settlement solution, what we have adopted to last year, helped us to really get the biggest impact with little engineering work, what we have to put in. 

And the last thing, the third thing I would say is, how can you expand this or use this solution for making it more future-proof? So I think now we have built a solution in our marketplace. When we launch in these new countries, we can take this. We can leverage this. And it comes out of the box. 

MATT CORLEY: Yeah, that makes sense. And when you are thinking about those, kind of, new countries from an expansion standpoint, what are you most focused on as you approach those new segments? 

JOSH SPERLING: That’s a great question. I think, you know, in general, payment preferences, as most of you know, vary drastically from country to country. I’d say this largely depends on the type of platform you’re operating. If you’re in the digital-services space, for example, talent marketplaces like Upwork or Contra, expanding your payments capabilities and what currencies or wallets sellers can use to get paid out, that can lead to further growth for your platform and directly unlock new opportunities for both sellers and buyers alike. 

MATT CORLEY: Well, we talked about this a little bit. So Turo uses both Connect and Global Payouts to facilitate various payout use cases. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you use each product? 

JOSH SPERLING: Yeah. So last year, we went through the process of upgrading our system used to process claims payouts. Essentially, you know, Turo offers some level of protection for guests and hosts. And as part of that program, we pay out hundreds of millions of dollars to third parties. Naturally, the payment-processing system for this needs to take very different factors into account compared to our typical Connect structure. 

So whereas a host earning on Turo—they have a Connect account, they have a Turo account where we can onboard them—we typically pay them directly from the funds that we receive from guests, and they typically receive ACH payments. These third parties all have different preferences for how that payout needs to get configured. They don’t have accounts with Turo, and we don’t want to add a ton of friction to the signup flow. 

And we typically fund this either from our platform account directly or from an external bank account. So the needs for Connect and Global Payouts are drastically different depending on the part of our platform where we’re using it. So what’s nice is we’re able to incorporate Global Payouts, and guests still have this consistent experience—sorry—hosts have this consistent experience where they get their earnings from Stripe, and they get their claims payouts from Stripe. 

And we have the advantage of having a sort of backend and reporting that can rely upon infrastructure and rails that we’re well familiar with while still kind of meeting those unique needs of different parts of our platform. 

MATT CORLEY: Got it. So really focused on kind of streamlining the payout experience for those where there isn’t necessarily an associated pay-in, and you have to go out and make sure they get those funds seamlessly without having kind of putting a ton of friction in place. 

SHAA ALAGUMUTHU: Yeah, I think there is a striking difference in technically how we move the funds between these two adoptions. Probably that’s one of the reasons why we get into these. The first one is for our marketplace payments. The host gets paid out with the earnings, what they are earning by sharing their vehicle. So that money really comes from the guest who is paying. So as a marketplace provider, we don’t really need a license to hold these funds on our end. 

So we use a Connect-like solution, which fits in very well to solve the problem and do their KYC verifications and blends in well versus, for the Global Payout solution, what we have adopted, that’s for the claims payout, which is more like a B2C payments, what Turo as a business is paying out to our host for the damages of the vehicles. So these are having these very unique needs, which is all the way from the product and all the way to the reporting. So that’s one reason why we think these are the right fit. 

MATT CORLEY: Yeah, so Connect keeping you out of the funds flow, ensuring you don’t need to go and get the necessary licensing to do so. For Global Payouts, you may not need that level, and you can step right in and transfer funds. So good to hear. I’m curious. What has been your light-bulb moment when it comes to payouts more broadly over the last couple of years? 

SHAA ALAGUMUTHU: Yeah, when you talk about the light-bulb movement, probably this happened a few years ago when we integrated with Connect. I think the more self-manageable it is for our customers to manage their accounts, I think it’s less the friction and easier for us to scale the platform. I think that’s the most important learning, I would say. 

So we really wanted an ideal experience where our customers can manage their payment accounts in our product, in the right places. Like when they onboard, we want them to onboard on the payments account. And when they manage their transactions, we want them to manage their payment account, like doing the necessary verifications and stuff. So I think this is where Connect as a product really helped us to focus on what we really are good at, like building a good experience for our guest and host, like a marketplace. And let Stripe handle the complex pieces like the compliance and tax and all the account management. 

JOSH SPERLING: Yeah. I’ll add there’s a lot of flexibility when integrating payout solutions with Stripe where you can own a lot of the experience, or you can kind of let Stripe handle a pretty nice guest experience that happens outside of your platform. And typically when having these sort of, like, product engineering trade-offs, it’s really easy to decide. Like let’s go with the quick route with integration that’s not fully embedded into our product. We get to market faster, and it’s still a solid experience. 

I think one key learning is taking into account other factors outside of just that experience and even just the deliverability. For example, one other metric that our team pays close attention to is the number of support contacts related to payments. If our system is operating as intended, it’s operating well, it should be very limited. 

So we found that with certain payouts integrations, if we weren’t taking the time to embed them into our product correctly so we could handle edge cases and give hosts a way to come back and manage their account, make updates like they need, it creates a lot of cost on the back end. And while that trade-off feels like you’re saving a lot of time up front, at the end of the day, taking a little bit of extra time and building a more cohesive experience that results in lower costs at the end of the day is often the right decision. 

MATT CORLEY: Yeah, so really streamlining operations—and obviously you mentioned the support queue. I have to imagine, you know, we saw the stat: 99.5% of your payouts were successful. I’m curious. What percentage have you driven down the failed payments? And then what is that associated to, from that support outreach? 

JOSH SPERLING: Definitely. Yes. Deliverability, experience, host experience is really important to us as well as reducing support contacts. And we were able to kind of toggle on and integrate Financial Connections for our Global Payouts. And it made a huge impact across each of those three areas. So we were able to see a 75% reduction in payout failures. 

I think maybe one kind of interesting learning going through all of these sorts of troubles and support cases related to payouts is a lot of them aren’t even, like, core payments-related problems. You know, the majority of problems we were seeing initially was customers entering the wrong routing number or, you know, setting up an account as electronic when it should be a wire or vice versa. So Financial Connections kind of eliminates those problems and lets you directly connect to your bank account and kind of the user experience that we’ve come to expect from payments as a consumer. 

SHAA ALAGUMUTHU: Yeah. I think, as you said, like there is always room to optimize, isn’t it, like while we are working on this, like as we are approaching this customer-support use case. Like, one way how we are trying to even further automate things is using this webhook integrations, which really help us close the loop in completely automating the workflow where the customer or host gets notified when their account is on due for some information through webhooks. And they really come and update. And really, it closes the loop. 

MATT CORLEY: Yeah, so really streamlining operations, I imagine, again, helping a number of other teams across Turo, allowing you all to move very lean. What is your advice for payments leaders in the audience today, especially those who are running marketplaces? How do you set your money-movement strategy going forward? 

SHAA ALAGUMUTHU: Yeah. I won’t call it advice. I think the people in this room—many of us are building solutions, payment solutions. We all know it’s complex. I think one way we realized how we can manage this complexity is by building a well-abstracted platform which is more cohesive and also well integrated with the layers above and below, like Lego blocks, how you build. And when I say above, it’s more into how it can enable the product experience to get faster to the market and pick and choose these capabilities to build different experiences needed for the business. 

And at the same time, it works well and integrated well with the bottom with functions like accounting, data, analytics, and audit so that they can seamlessly get the needed information, agnostic of how the business cases are evolving. So I think that’s the very ideal way we think we can build a platform because payments has been evolving beyond just payment as a function. It’s also empowering the business through the data to make the right business decisions and risk decisions and stuff, which we are very well seeing in our marketplace. 

JOSH SPERLING: Yeah. At the risk of giving the kind of generic product answer, I’d say marketplace strategy really depends on your goals and the problems and preferences of your customers. So I’d say one, I think, common thread I’ve seen in payments working across various startups is a lot of the time the question is really, how can you unlock growth via payments? And with growth as the objective, you know, you really need to understand your customers’ needs to know what’s going to accomplish that goal. 

So at Turo, we’ve come to understand that our guests really value flexibility at the time of payments. And we’ve been able to meaningfully grow the Turo platform over the last couple years by leaning into pay-as-you-go, buy-now-pay-later, deferred-pay sort of use cases because we know that that’s going to help our customers get past the point of purchase and be happy with their decision to do so. 

Speaking to the payout side, let’s say you’re a global marketplace and you’re trying to grow in different regions. A common customer problem for sellers and markets with high currency volatility might be the fact that they don’t like to get paid out in their local currency like we typically do if you’re in Venezuela, Argentina. And those sellers are typically going to be big fans of stablecoin payouts. And implementing USDC payouts might actually be the thing that gets them to switch over from another platform to yours. So I think really taking into account your business goals and what problems are most important to solve for your users is the key components there. 

MATT CORLEY: Yeah. You’re going to differentiate by building the best car-rental platform in the world. You’re not going to differentiate by taking all this pay-ins and payouts work in-house. And so thank you, Josh and Shaa, for joining us today. As you see, global marketplaces today, like Turo, are really using Stripe to help accelerate growth, reduce costs, and streamline your operations. For those who want to learn more, we will be down at the marketplaces booth on the expo level, happy to talk all things payouts and marketplaces. Thanks, everyone.