On Tuesday, we held our annual conference in San Francisco where we share our roadmap and directly get feedback from our customers. Thanks to those of you who joined us in SF or on the livestream!
We’ve invested significantly in our Global Payments and Treasury Network and our software applications in the past year, shipping more than 250 new features.
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.
Logging is one of the oldest and most ubiquitous patterns in computing. We’ve found using a slight augmentation to traditional logging immensely useful at Stripe—an idea that we call canonical log lines. It’s a simple technique: in addition to their normal log traces, requests also emit one long log line at the end that includes many of their key characteristics. Having that data colocated in single information-dense lines makes queries and aggregations over it faster to write, and faster to run.
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.
Today we’re excited to make Stripe Terminal available to all users in the US. Terminal is a set of SDKs, APIs, and pre-certified card readers that lets you extend your Stripe integration to accept in-person payments. Businesses of all types are already using Stripe Terminal to build their in-person payment experiences.
One of our favorite things about working at Stripe is that we serve some of the most demanding customers: high-growth, technology businesses, rapidly expanding around the world, inventing new business models along the way. In some ways, that makes our job harder—it’s tough to stay ahead! But in other ways it makes things a lot simpler. As we think about the next few years of Stripe’s development, we don’t have to overcomplicate things. We can set our roadmap directly based on what we hear from our users.
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.
Stripe builds economic infrastructure, and we’re designing for a global audience and market. In doing so, we carefully consider our technology and tools, organizational structure, and employee representation. Successful global organizations establish this mindset for different reasons. For some, it’s foundational—their mission, product, and addressable market crosses time zones. Others develop an international customer base, hire remote employees, or begin to open offices abroad to extend their physical presence.
Many of our product features, like sending invoices or setting up plans with Stripe Billing, applying rules in Stripe Radar, or creating custom reports in Stripe Sigma, can be used directly from the Dashboard. We’ve recently made a number of updates to improve common workflows in the Dashboard and to make it easier to manage your business—no API requests required.
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.
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.
Today, we're launching the Stripe Partner Program to amplify and help grow our platform, plugin, and extension partners. 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.
Today, we’re excited to share that we’re launching free 24×7 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.
Reserved instances are hard to purchase effectively. It’s easy to allocate the wrong number, and hard to predict future compute requirements over time. Deciding which and how many reserved instances to buy is a non-trivial exercise at the nexus of cloud strategy, bin packing, and capacity planning. Here's how we use AWS Reserved Instances to dynamically scale our fleet of servers and predictably forecast our cloud spend.
Over the next few weeks, we’re rolling out new features in the Dashboard to help marketplaces and platforms efficiently run their business on Stripe Connect. With these improvements, you can send funds to your sellers or service providers (“connected accounts”), see detailed breakdowns of an account’s recent activity, and quickly update account information directly in the Connect portion of the Dashboard.