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.

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.

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.

We’ve added a number of new features to Stripe Payments over the last few months that might be useful for your business.

Today, we’re adding support for creating a limited liability company (LLC) with Stripe Atlas. It’s been one of the most requested features from our users, and we’re excited to make it possible.

We launched Radar in 2016 to help protect our users from fraud. We’ve blocked billions of dollars in fraud across the Stripe network for companies of all sizes—from startups like Slice and WeSwap to larger companies like Fitbit and OpenTable. Since launch, we’ve continuously invested in our suite of fraud prevention tools, and today, we’re excited to launch the result of those efforts.

Today, we’re excited to launch Stripe Billing, a new suite of tools to help companies of all sizes automate, optimize, and scale recurring business models. This new product is an evolution of Stripe Subscriptions and adds many new features.

Today, we’ve added a new Developers section to the Dashboard that helps you build and manage your Stripe integration. You can monitor API and webhook usage in real time, manage API upgrades, and find all our developer tools in one place.

We’ll be turning off support for all API requests to Stripe from servers using older versions of TLS on June 13, 2018. The TLS protocol is used to encrypt your servers’ communications with Stripe, so it’s important that your integration uses the latest version. (TLS 1.2 is much more secure than its predecessors.)

We are winding down support for Bitcoin payments. Over the next three months we will work with affected Stripe users to ensure a smooth transition before we stop processing Bitcoin transactions on April 23, 2018.

We’ve heard from many Stripe Atlas entrepreneurs that getting business taxes right is painful. It’s hard to know what taxes you owe, good accountants are expensive and hard to find, and fixing mistakes is even more expensive. All of this takes time away from building your product and company.

We built a distributed cron job scheduling system on top of Kubernetes, an exciting new platform for container orchestration. In this post, we’ll explain why we chose to build on top of Kubernetes, how we integrated Kubernetes into our existing infrastructure, our approach to building confidence in (and improving) our Kubernetes’ cluster’s reliability, and the abstractions we’ve built on top of Kubernetes.