When people talk about their data infrastructure, they tend to focus on the technologies: Hadoop, Scalding, Impala, and the like. However, we’ve found that just as important as the technologies themselves are the principles that guide their use. We’d like to share our experience with one such principle that we’ve found particularly useful: reproducibility.
We’ll talk about our motivation for focusing on reproducibility, how we’re using Jupyter Notebooks as our core tool, and the workflow we’ve developed around Jupyter to operationalize our approach.
With so many new technologies coming out every year (like Kubernetes or Habitat), it’s easy to become so entangled in our excitement about the future that we forget to pay homage to the tools that have been quietly supporting our production environments. One such tool we've been using at Stripe for several years now is Consul. Consul helps discover services (that is, it helps us navigate the thousands of servers we run with various services running on them and tells us which ones are up and available for use). This effective and practical architectural choice wasn't flashy or entirely novel, but has served us dutifully in our continued mission to provide reliable service to our users around the world.
Stripe Radar is a collection of tools to help businesses detect and prevent fraud. At Radar’s core is a machine learning engine that scans every card payment across Stripe’s 100,000+ businesses, aggregates information from those payments into behavioral signals that are predictive of fraud, and blocks payments that have a high probability of being fraudulent.
Radar’s power comes from all the data we obtain from the Stripe “network.” Instead of requiring users to label charges manually, Radar obtains the “ground truth” of fraud directly from our banking partners. Just as importantly, the signals we use in our models include aggregates over the entire stream of payments processed by Stripe: when a card is used for the first time on a Stripe business, there’s an 80% chance we’ve seen that card elsewhere on the Stripe network, and those previous interactions provide valuable information about potential fraud.
If you’re curious to learn more, we’ve put together a detailed outline that describes how we use machine learning at Stripe to detect and prevent fraud.
When a company writes about their observability stack, they often focus on sweet visualizations, advanced anomaly detection or innovative data stores. Those are well and good, but today we’d like to talk about the tip of the spear when it comes to observing your systems: metrics pipelines! Metrics pipelines are how we get metrics from where they happen—our hosts and services—to storage quickly and efficiently so they can be queried, all without interrupting the host service.
Today, we’re excited to publicly launch Stripe in Japan!
Every business in Japan can now sign up for Stripe and take advantage of the complete Stripe stack. Many core Stripe features—instant setup, support for 130+ currencies, the ability to build marketplaces, fast and frequent transfers, and more—have not been available in the Japanese market before.
When we started our beta in Japan last year, we saw an opportunity for our product to make a difference for local entrepreneurs: there is a growing local startup ecosystem, an appetite to build new types of businesses (like SaaS companies and marketplaces), and an increasing interest from Japanese companies to expand beyond the local market and go global.
Over the last year, thousands of the most innovative Japanese companies have battle-tested these features with us. Companies like Peatix (which builds tools to manage and grow communities), Gengo (which provides translations for businesses around the world), and ANA (the largest airline in Japan). We’d like to thank all our beta users for their feedback as we’ve rolled out and polished our product for Japan.
To support our Japanese users, we’ve also built a local team to provide reliable Japanese-language support out of our Harajuku office. If you’re interested in joining our growing team, please reach out!
We’re looking forward to seeing what these and future users will build on the new infrastructure we’re bringing to Japan. And if you have any questions or feedback, just drop me a line.
Today, we’re excited to fully launch Stripe to all Singaporean businesses—any entrepreneur in Singapore can now instantly start accepting payments.
Since our beta launch just last year, we’ve been thrilled to work with many innovative Singaporean companies to start and scale their businesses. Between subscription companies like Tradegecko and Guavapass, on-demand platforms like Grab, e-commerce startups like Grain and Hipvan, and new kinds of marketplaces like Oddle, more than 50% of venture-backed companies in Singapore now use Stripe. In addition, we’ve worked with global platforms like Shopify, Deliveroo, and Kickstarter to make their services available in Singapore.
With more than 90% of the population already using a smartphone, Singapore is one of the heaviest adopters of mobile technology in the world. And so, out of the box, we’ll enable Singaporean businesses to accept both Apple Pay and Android Pay.
Pricing is simple and predictable: 3.4% + S$0.50 per successful charge. Volume pricing is available for businesses at scale—please get in touch if you expect to process more than S$50,000 a month.
Founded as a nexus for trade between India, China, and Europe, Singapore embodies international commerce. We’re excited to support the next generation of global businesses being built by Singaporean entrepreneurs.
On that note, we’d love to grow our team in Singapore to help more businesses manage their global payments easily and securely. If you’d like to work with us in Singapore, or elsewhere, please reach out!
Starting today, marketplaces using Stripe Connect can send Instant Payouts to sellers or service providers on their platform. To start, it’ll be available to marketplaces in the U.S. using Managed Accounts.
Unlike traditional bank transfers that can take several days, Instant Payouts are deposited and available in just minutes. This way, marketplaces can give service providers a much better product experience by sending them their earnings faster than ever—and greater flexibility and control over when they get paid.
We’ve been testing Instant Payouts as a beta with platforms of all sizes, including Lyft, Instacart, goPanache, Postmates, and Care.com. Across our beta users, service providers for on-demand marketplaces are thrilled to receive earnings faster.
Lyft, which was the first platform to integrate last November, has already sent over $500 million to drivers using Instant Payouts. In fact, Lyft now sends the majority of its driver payouts instantly—the only ridesharing company to do so. (Check out what Lyft driver Justine had to say about Lyft’s Express Pay.)
Here’s how it works:
Collect debit card details: An increasing number of marketplaces are building their payout flows around debit cards. Bank details are hard to dig up and error-prone, but everyone has a debit card in their pocket. (Stripe will also automatically verify the details when a debit card is added.) Instant Payouts can be sent directly to service providers’ debit cards and funds are automatically deposited into the bank account linked to the debit card.
Let sellers request Instant Payouts: Platforms typically offer Instant Payouts as an option in addition to their regular payout timing. Marketplaces can also customize when service providers can request a payout to their bank accounts. For example, Lyft offers an instant payout option in addition to their weekly transfer—and only once a driver earns $5.50.
Send the payout: For the vast majority of payouts, funds are deposited within minutes. Initiating an Instant Payout requires just one additional parameter when creating a transfer:
Check out our docs for more details on how to integrate. Instant Payouts cost 1.5% of the payout amount, with a minimum fee of 50¢.
We’ve consistently heard from marketplaces of all sizes that attracting (and retaining) more service providers is crucial for growth and that this is often the tougher side of the marketplace to build. We’ve already seen that offering Instant Payouts has helped our beta users achieve that goal and we’re looking forward to more marketplaces enabling this feature soon.
If you have any questions, feedback, or need help getting started, please contact us!
