Today, we’re adding support for Twilio <Pay> to let businesses easily and securely accept payments over the phone.

Phone payments are especially common in industries like food, travel, healthcare, retail, and nonprofits, but payment details are often keyed in manually by a human agent. This flow can be riddled with errors and expose companies to security and compliance risks. That’s why we’re partnering with Twilio to help companies integrate phone payments quickly while ensuring the checkout flow remains secure and PCI compliant.

With Twilio <Pay>, businesses can now securely collect payment details with an interactive voice response flow, which is useful for automating payment experiences such as bill collection or donations. For a more personalized experience, employees can also walk customers through an order over the phone: when it’s time to collect the payment, the agent activates Twilio <Pay> to let the customer enter payment info using their keypad—agents can follow the customer’s progress, but won’t see or hear the card details.

Twilio will automatically prompt the customer for their card number, expiry date, postal code, and security code. Stripe’s integration ensures that sensitive data never hits your servers and generates a token that you can use to charge the card. Here’s an example Twilio <Pay> flow:

<Response>
  <Say>Thanks for calling Rocket Rides!</Say>
  <Pay paymentConnector="RocketRides"
       chargeAmount="30.34"
       statusCallback="/pay-status"
       action="/pay-action">
    <Prompt for="payment-processing">
      <Say>
        Thank you, please wait while we
        process your jetpack payment.
      </Say>   
    </Prompt>
  </Pay>
</Response>

The generated token can be used not only for a single payment, but also stored on Stripe to make future purchases frictionless for customers. Since our support for Twilio <Pay> is fully integrated with the rest of the Stripe platform, businesses can even start a subscription plan with the saved card using Stripe Billing.

As you’d expect, payments made over the phone will show up alongside payments made online or in person in your unified Stripe Dashboard.

If you’re interested, you can get started by adding the Stripe Connector in your Twilio console and connecting your Stripe account to Twilio. Then, create a TwiML Bin with a Twilio <Pay> prompt. There’s more information in the <Pay> tutorial.

We’re excited to see what new experiences businesses will build with Stripe’s integration for Twilio <Pay>. If you have questions or feedback, please let us know!

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.

In the years ahead, we plan to hire hundreds of people to help us expand our infrastructure, build completely new products, and ensure that Stripe’s product suite works just as well in Southeast Asia as it does in Europe and North America.

More than 200 million Southeast Asians will come online in the next two years, and the region’s vibrant internet economy—growing to more than $200 billion by 2025—comprises more than 7,000 high-growth startups. We think that this is just the beginning, and that the region will see vast innovation in the years ahead.

Our Singapore hub will include all of the core Stripe functions: product and engineering teams based here will work on expanding the geographic footprint of Stripe’s existing global payments and treasury network, help build completely new products, and further develop the underlying infrastructure powering Stripe. Today, Stripe works with more than 1 million companies in more than 100 countries around the world. Our Singapore team will help those companies be significantly more successful in the world’s fastest-growing internet region.

We’re proud to be building this presence in Singapore. The country has long understood the importance of global integration and technological advancement, leading the world in everything from containerization to commodities. Singapore embodies a positive-sum economic mindset that serves as an example for the world.

If you’re interested in working with us to help establish Stripe’s engineering hub in Singapore, please get in touch!

Platforms can now use Connect just for the payouts portion of their business. Without changing any existing methods of accepting payments, platforms can use Connect Payouts to top up their Stripe account from a bank account and pay out recipients through the Dashboard or via the API. Now, more platforms can take advantage of Stripe Connect’s payout automation, reporting and verification.

Pay recipients faster with less manual work

To pay recipients today, many platforms’ workflows require managing multiple CSVs, scrolling through countless rows of payment data, mailing paper checks, and manually tracking payouts. Stripe’s Dashboard tools and flexible API bring your data together in one place and automate manual processes to help your team save time and money.

We were wasting countless hours manually tracking our payouts to sellers with ACH. When we switched to Connect Payouts, we were able to automate our payout process while rapidly scaling our business. It’s saved us a ton of engineering work and tracking has been significantly easier.
— Jenny Gonsalves, VP of Engineering, Lyra Health

Send funds via the API or through the Dashboard

Previously, Stripe Connect required that payouts were linked to incoming payments. Now, you can use Connect Payouts to top up your Stripe account via a linked bank account and pay out recipients as needed through the Dashboard or automatically via the API.

We used to pay sellers with paper checks. But bandwidth constraints on our accounting team, challenges verifying mailing addresses, and the risk of checks getting lost in the mail meant they sometimes waited weeks to get paid. Since implementing Connect Payouts, sellers are paid automatically in three days or less—they love it and regularly mention it in Yelp reviews.
— Dennis Bron, Head of Growth and Business Intelligence, Shift

New use cases for existing platforms with Top-ups

If your platform currently uses Stripe Connect in the US, you can also take advantage of the new Top-ups functionality. You can now add additional funds to your Stripe account as needed from a linked bank account, which should help make some use cases that were previously tricky to operationalize easier:

• Sending bonuses or other one-off payouts, unrelated to a customer payment
• Paying sellers or service providers (“connected accounts”) the full amount while simultaneously providing discounts to customers
• Enabling faster payouts by paying connected accounts before the charged funds are available

How to use Top-ups and Connect Payouts

1. Top up your Stripe account via a linked bank account:

2. Send payouts to recipients through the Dashboard or automatically via the API. (You can onboard your recipients using Connect Express’s pre-built UI flows or customize everything with our API.)

Connect Payouts and Top-ups are available to platforms based in the US to start. If you’re interested, you can try out these new features in test mode or learn more in our docs.

We’d love to hear your feedback. Please reach out if you have any questions or comments.

Today, we’re launching the Stripe Partner Program to amplify and help grow our platform, plugin, and extension partners.

Thousands of companies like Shopify, DocuSign, WooCommerce, and Xero work with Stripe to let businesses and individuals accept payments directly within their products. Other companies, like Segment or Avalara, build extensions that add new features and capabilities to the Stripe platform.

Stripe’s APIs and operational infrastructure help partners bring businesses online and enable new types of businesses. We help handle everything related to payments, including global compliance, 24x7 payments support, and supporting the latest features.

We’ve been thrilled to see the new payment experiences that our partners have built and we’ve designed our program to enable them to build and launch faster, reach more customers, and operate at scale.

Registering for the Stripe Partner Program is free. Partners get access to documentation and best practices collected from across the Stripe network to help them optimize their integration and launch quickly and easily.

Partners can also choose to become a Stripe Verified Partner to get additional benefits—from the ability to escalate support requests on behalf of their customers to a listing in our curated partners gallery to reach Stripe businesses. (Learn more about the verification process and pricing.)

This is just the start. We’re excited to build more products and resources for our partners in the future. If you have any questions, feedback, or are considering building an integration, please get in touch!

Let’s grow the internet economy together. Become a partner

Today, we’re excited to share that we’re launching free 24x7 phone and chat support for all Stripe users. In addition to the email support we already offer, you’ll now be able to reach us via phone or chat from support.stripe.com after logging in.

Providing great support at scale is complex. Stripe now serves millions of businesses worldwide. To provide responsive support over phone, chat, and email, we’ve invested in every aspect of how we serve our users over the past few years—from building infrastructure and tooling to hiring teammates across 9 offices and all timezones. Our priority is getting you the right answer no matter how you choose to contact us and we’re continuously working to make every support interaction better.

We also treat support as a learning engine. We’ve built internal systems that turn standard support metrics into detailed insights that help with everything from routing and categorizing questions more efficiently to providing the right contextual information. Many of the improvements our engineering teams make to Stripe’s products and features stem from reading the syntheses of support issues.

We hope these additional ways to reach the Stripe team help you and your business. Phone and chat support will be available in English to start. Email support will continue to be available in English, German, French, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. If you have a technical question, you’re also welcome to hop into the #stripe IRC channel on freenode.

We rely on your feedback to improve our products and features, so please let us know how we can better support you.

Get help with a question or give us feedback. Contact support