ANNOUNCER: And now please welcome to the stage, Stripe cofounder and CEO, Patrick Collison.

PATRICK COLLISON: Good morning and welcome to Stripe Sessions. So, this is our first time convening in person since 2019, and we’re just so excited to be able to do this live here with all of you today.

This year is actually by far our largest ever Sessions, more than three times bigger than 2019, and it’s really great to see so many familiar faces back here today.

Now, you might have heard us say before that our mission is to grow the GDP of the internet. We’re big believers in the possibilities of entrepreneurship and free markets. And you know, while there aren’t that many people who jump out of bed in the morning excited about the dynamics of GDP, there’s a bunch of them at Stripe but they’re unusual. Our enthusiasm really comes from our admiration for what you’re doing.

So, we wanted to start out today by saying thank you. The responsibility of serving you well is at the center of our world view, and we’re just hugely grateful for your partnership.

Now, it’s a pretty interesting time for those of us working in the internet economy. You know, some of the dynamics unfolding around us today include disruptions in financial services and banking. There was obviously a much more eventful start to the year than, I think it’s fair to say, any of us expected. There’s ongoing reconfiguration around ecommerce. While some of the acceleration caused by the pandemic has subsided, we’re still seeing record highs on many metrics.

There’s major evolution—excuse me—in payment schemes, and new systems like Pix and DuitNow gaining traction all around the world. Of course, there’s large language models and generative AI and everything that these new technologies are now making possible. And of course, you know, there are significant challenges, from inflation and interest rates and the downstream effects that they are having on capital markets and on funding.

And so, we actually surveyed all of you in advance to get a sense for how these trends are showing up in your businesses, and we won’t go through the full results here, but I was struck by some of the findings.

Most of you agree that near-term revenue and cost efficiencies are more pressing, more urgent than they were in the past. And that’s not too surprising. But what is encouraging is that most of you still expect your revenue to grow by more than 25% this year, like a significant majority.

So, despite all the headwinds, you know, you think that the opportunity landscape remains quite favorable, and we agree.

And so, we’ll touch on these macro themes throughout today and there are ways in which basically all of them intersect with our roadmap. But first, we want to give you a very quick update on the Stripe business itself. If you want a detailed version of this, you can go check out our annual letter.

So, we started to make our annual letters public for the first time last year, and we found it really helpful to circulate them so that you can give us your feedback. But if we take some overall highlights here, so we’ll compare 2019, again, last time we got together, with today.

And so, in 2019, businesses across the Stripe ecosystem processed around $216 billion. So, we were operating at a pretty significant scale back then. But this has continued to grow a lot, which is to say you have continued to grow a lot. And over the next 12 months, businesses across Stripe will process more than a trillion dollars on the platform. It’s really pretty remarkable.

There are more than twice as many businesses building on Stripe by absolute count as there were in 2019. And this group is growing significantly faster outside the US.

Last year, we actually celebrated 10 years from the launch of our first European market. We launched in the UK at the end of April in 2019, and I think they’re still in Europe. And today, today, London is actually our number-one city in the world by number of businesses served, with over 100,000 London businesses building on Stripe—and welcome to anyone flying in from London.

And then finally, in 2019, there were around 1,600 new businesses going live on Stripe every week. That figure is now closer to 4,600 new businesses launching in any given seven-day period.

And to that sum of how things have changed from our standpoint, but zooming out from particular stats, I tried to think of just the three biggest structural changes in Stripe since we last saw each other. And if I had to generalize a little, I think they’re, one, expanding our product suite to solve many of the adjacent problems in payments in kind of a cohesive and a unified way. And so things like marketplace management and card issuance, identity verification, bank account authentication, lending. We’re really investing here at the scale of some of these problems.

And then second, as a result of that investment, we’ve seen really rapidly growing adoption by some of the world’s largest companies, and there are now actually more than a hundred businesses, each processing more than $1 billion of revenue every year on Stripe. And there are many new companies joining this cohort every quarter.

And then finally, and this is one that I’m really proud of, payments as a revenue booster. And so, what’s going on here is historically, Stripe was known for flexibility and ease of use and really making life better for developers. And those are very important things. But we’ve taken the core essence of payments very seriously over the last couple of years. And what we’re now consistently finding is that Stripe can help you meaningfully grow your topline revenue.

The reason for this is there is still so much that’s broken and inefficient in online transactions. Outsiders sometimes think that these problems are basically solved, but anyone here knows just how far that is from being true. So, we are seeing that fixing these problems has a lot of upside.

So, we’re very excited about all of these. And so, for the rest of this morning, we’re going to cover our product improvements in more detail. And to do that, I’m going to hand it over to Will.

WILL GAYBRICK: Hello and thank you so much, Patrick. Great to see you all here today. And for those of you who were here in 2019, if you don’t recognize me, it’s probably the mustache and you know, reviews have been mixed at best. But today, we’re going to cover the three key parts of the Stripe product portfolio. So, global payments, embedded payments, and banking as a service, and then revenue and finance automation.

It’s probably no surprise that we’re going to start with global payments, because it’s really the sort of throughline of everything we do. In fact, I have been learning payments now for almost eight years. Eight years in the guts of global payment systems, and it’s a career path that I did not anticipate when I was in my twenties.

At a glance, it’s just about accepting and paying out money, but when you look deeper, it’s a really interesting and challenging problem. It’s about allowing businesses to access, model, and then orchestrate complex commercial systems, global card networks, regional debit networks, wallets, bank specs, payment methods, and so on.

This is a risk-bearing, regionalized, and highly regulated endeavor, and it’s sort of an auto-generative problem space because regulations change and these systems just get more and more complicated.

And for all of you CFOs, CEOs, payments leaders, we know there’s just never enough time or resources, just too many pressing projects. So, our payments engineers work each day to give you all leverage, and we’re doing this in three major ways.

The first is in optimizing checkout flows. The second is unifying your offline and online commerce channels. And the third is giving you access to advanced payments capabilities and ML optimizations.

So, let’s start with optimizing checkout flows. Over the past decade, there’s been an explosion of new payment methods. Commerce has globalized but also regionalized, and mobile commerce has boomed.

All these trends create a ton of opportunity but also a lot of complexity. So, we built Stripe Checkout and Stripe Elements. Checkout’s been around for a while. It’s a brandable, Stripe-hosted payments page that you can port to your own domain. Because we host it, you can add payment methods, tax logic, subscriptions logic, and a whole lot more purely with config changes in your dashboard. It’s used by tens of thousands of startups but also some more established companies like OpenAI and Twitter.

But for businesses who want even more control, we built Stripe Elements, a set of embeddable payments UIs that camouflage into your own page. So, let’s take a look at it in action.

So, meet Furni, a fictional global furniture retailer with Scandinavian heritage, and meet Bharath, a payments engineer at Furni. This is going to be a live demo with Bharath writing live code, so let’s hope it works.

This is Furni’s checkout page. It works, but it looks like a lot of effort for someone trying to buy furniture. So, Bharath, can you improve it?

BHARATH SRIVATSAN: Of course. Let’s do it.

It’s actually not just the UI that’s complex. The code that powers this checkout page is also super complicated. It involves hundreds of lines of form validations, country-specific logic. I’m sure you’ve all seen things like this. It started simple, but it’s gotten much messier over time.

Code bases like this make the checkout page really hard to change. Adding a new payment method, for example, takes a ton of work and carries the risk of unintended side effects.

I’m going to start by replacing all of this code by a short snippet to add the payment element, which is the core of Stripe Elements. Let’s copy that from the Stripe docs right now.

Great. Now, back on the page, I’ve immediately got a frictionless UI that comes with more than a hundred features and optimizations that are super time-consuming to build from scratch, things like real-time card number validation, third-party auto-fills, screen-size optimizations, helpful error messages, and much more will make life easier for my customers.

Stripe also recently built the address element to collect shipping address information. So, let me go ahead and add that, and now I’ve got address auto-complete ready for 236 global address formats just like that.

So, I just replaced all that code, hundreds of lines of code, with a few tiny snippets, and I’ve got this beautiful, optimized checkout.

WILL GAYBRICK: So, this already looks pretty good, but you know, a Scandinavian design company has super-specific brand guidelines. They want the utmost control and customization of their UIs, and this is consistent with what you all have told us as well. So, Bharath, can we do even better?

BHARATH SRIVATSAN: Totally. I can use Stripe’s Elements appearance API to modify component-level styles. Let’s start by matching the accent colors and label boldness to match Furni’s brand guidelines. Well, maybe we get rid of the text color to make it more subtle. And yeah, that looks good.

WILL GAYBRICK: Okay. Well, you mentioned that adding payment methods was one of the hardest things with the old setup. What would that look like now?

BHARATH SRIVATSAN: Yeah. Actually, by turning on the payment element, Furni already got access to almost 50 global payment methods right out of the box. For example, I can add Affirm directly from the Stripe Dashboard. You don’t even need to be a developer to do that. Just go down. Turn it on. And back on the page. Looks like that worked.

If you do turn on a bunch of payment methods, Stripe uses machine learning trained on billions of data points to display and order them to maximize conversion for each specific customer on each specific page.

Just like that, I built an optimized and customized checkout page with a fraction of the engineering effort.

WILL GAYBRICK: Well, that’s pretty amazing. Okay, so, let’s add one more flourish, and for that, I’m going to bring up Clara here to talk about Link.

CLARA LIANG: Every hour, millions of customers make a purchase from a business that uses Stripe. And as Will shared, we’ve spent years working to optimize each of your checkouts, but a new customer visiting your site for the first time still has to start from scratch. They’re manually entering their card details, their shipping and billing addresses. It’s 2023. We should do better. And that’s why we’ve built Link, one-click checkout that works across Stripe’s entire network of merchants. This means customers can now save their payment details at any site where Link is enabled and then reuse them for fast and easy checkout at every site with Link.

So, Bharath, can you help us turn on Link for Furni, please?

BHARATH SRIVATSAN: Sure. That’s just another button in the Dashboard.

CLARA LIANG: All right. And can we see a checkout with Link?

BHARATH SRIVATSAN: Totally. So, like millions of other users, I signed up for Link earlier when I was subscribing to ChatGPT Plus. So, when I go to check out at Furni, you’ll see that I’m already logged in and my payment details and shipping address are prefilled. Are you ready?

CLARA LIANG: Let’s do it.

BHARATH SRIVATSAN: Great. There it is. And folks, remember, I’ve never checked out at Furni before. I’m a first-time Furni shopper. But there are all my details. I’ve got the most frictionless possible checkout. The only thing I’ve got to do is hit buy.

There we go.

CLARA LIANG: As you can see, Link is a huge user-experience win. That demo wasn’t sped up. The average logged-in user out there on the internet takes just six seconds to check out. But we’re not stopping there, and here are just three of our recent updates.

First, we’ve causally demonstrated that a logged-in Link user is 7% more likely to make a purchase. That’s a lot more revenue for you right away.

In addition—in addition to cards, customers can now save bank accounts to Link. So, as you all know, connecting your bank account is kind of as frictionful as it gets. You’re manually entering your account number and routing number. You are waiting multiple days for microdeposit confirmations. Maybe you’re bouncing into your banking app, logging in, and then two-factoring. By contrast, after you’ve saved your bank account details to Link, paying by bank is frictionless.

And third, some of the most sophisticated companies on the internet are now part of Link, including Twitter and Midjourney and, as of this morning, Uber, which I was able to take my Uber to Sessions this morning and I did use Link to pay by bank on the way here. And also, Airbnb, who shared this morning that they’re enabling Link to make it easier for their customers to pay for longer stays.

So, when you turn on Link, you immediately benefit from all the other Stripe users who have already turned it on. Today, that’s hundreds of thousands of businesses who are collectively adding millions of new customers each month. That’s millions of new customers who can check out faster and convert better on your site.

WILL GAYBRICK: Okay. So, with checkout and Elements, it’s that easy to offload hundreds or even thousands of lines of code and to stop spending all the expensive engineering resources you’re using to build and maintain your checkout.

But our most powerful objective is actually to maximize your revenue. So, how are we doing on that? Well, a few months back, we tested the overall impact of all of these optimizations on your revenue. We looked at a group of 5,000 users who had migrated to the payment element that Bharath just showed us. And we compared these 5,000 with a control group of 5,000 other users with nearly identical characteristics, and we matched across industry, growth rate, business size, region, and so on.

We were astounded by the results. So, if you look here, the lighter line is the group who migrated, and the darker one is the control. The white bar is the moment of migration. You can see the revenue of the migrating group shoots up almost immediately. And in steady state, steady state, its revenue outperformed the control by an average of 10.5%. 10.5% more revenue.

To contextualize this, the S&P 500 grew its revenue in aggregate by 10.4% in all of 2022. And that was a banner year.

So, by switching to the Payment Element, you can outpace an entire year of S&P 500 revenue growth in a matter of weeks. You can leave behind hundreds of lines of code, countless engineering days and weeks and months you’re spending to maintain them, and you can create a better experience for your customers, precisely matching the brand guidelines for your site, putting dozens of payment methods at their fingertips, and even offering them the most frictionless checkout possible with Link.

Within the context of global payments and maybe just more broadly, in business, there’s no other single change you can make that will have this kind of impact with so little effort required.

Now, everything we just covered relates to online commerce, mobile, and web. We’ve also heard from all of you how important it is to unify commerce across online and offline channels. So, to tell you more about what’s new with Stripe Terminal, here’s Katie.

KATIE DILL: Thank you, Will. And hello, everyone. As Will just mentioned, we built Stripe Terminal to unify commerce across your online and offline businesses. Currently, you can see Stripe Terminal around the world, from paying for your lunch at a hawker stand in Singapore to grabbing merch at a musical festival in Palm Springs or buying a raincoat at a global retailer.

Worldwide, there are now 173,000 Terminal devices in the wild. But in many ways, the online and in-person experiences have remained quite different. Yes, you can take payments in person and data syncs on the backend. But the online experience you have carefully designed doesn’t come through when customers buy in person.

You’ve been telling us for some time that you want hardware that bridges the gap, not just taking payments but running your full point-of-sale application. This week, we announced our latest Stripe design hardware, Stripe Reader S700. It’s a sleek, modern device that lets you quickly build a customized checkout with our prebuilt elements, or you can run your own point-of-sale directly on the reader, incorporating the same design standards, loyalty programs, and customer data collection that you have invested in online. Not to mention it has our longest battery life yet and soon supports offline mode. Let’s see it in action.

I went to Furni.com earlier and saw a lovely beige couch and a throw pillow I really liked, but I wanted to see how they looked in person, so I came into the store. But it turns out there are so many shades of beige at the Scandinavian furniture store that I actually can’t remember which beige I was looking at.

BHARATH SRIVATSAN: Not a problem. By the way, all of those beige couches were generated with Midjourney, but we went a little too hard with the beige couch generation. That’s not an issue at all.

With the Furni app running on the S700, we can pretty easily look up Katie’s details and see what she put in her cart online. It looks like you were looking at the pillow and sofa in the Cosmic Latte tone.

KATIE DILL: Cosmic Latte, yes. How could I forget that? They look even better in person, so I’d like to buy them both. Can I get them shipped to my house?

BHARATH SRIVATSAN: Totally. Let’s add them both to your cart, and on the checkout page, since Katie is a previous Furni customer, we already have her address on file, so we can go straight to checkout.

Katie, if you would, just tap your card.

And we’re done. Receipt’s in your email.

KATIE DILL: Thank you. Stripe Reader S700 goes further than traditional payments hardware by providing on-reader customizations for different business needs. You can now truly unify your online and in-person checkout experiences with the same branding, the same custom flows, the same design excellence, and we’re so excited to see what you build.

WILL GAYBRICK: All right. Thank you so much, Katie. Guys, we are going to talk about enterprise payment, so it is time to get amped up. There’s a Red Bull taped to the bottom of your chair and—just kidding. This isn’t Dreamforce. No—Salesforce—just kidding. We love you guys. Stripe user.

All right. So, earlier this year, we announced that Amazon, which has long been a partner across many global markets, is now moving a significant percentage of its core North American retail and marketplace business onto Stripe.

So, why are companies like Amazon moving to Stripe? Well, for one, we give you easy access to a vast and ever-growing array of enterprise features that you need to run a heavily optimized global payment stack. This is things like network tokens, now across 36 markets, or real-time card account updater, which is available globally or extended auth windows or incremental auth or overcapture and multicapture or PIN-less debit networks in the US or eftpos in Australia or Cartes Bancaires in France or JCB in Japan or Interac in Canada or a local acquiring from markets like Thailand to Nigeria to the UAE or many dozens of global payment—global and regional payment methods. We added 20 in the past two years alone.

Or you’ve even been asking for a long time for this vault-and-forward solution. We already have that in beta in Europe, but it’s going to be available globally.

So, this is a long, long list and a lot of complexity, and your teams can directly access and orchestrate all of these features or you can ask us to put them on autopilot mode.

So, for example, you can choose between a PAN or a network token. Or you can ask us to decide, and we’ll route between the two based on the historical performance of the precise BIN of the card issuer to maximize your auth rate.

And payments as a domain is amenable to nearly endless optimization like this. It can be, you know, dynamically formatting ISO messages or retrying failed transactions across networks. And we obsess over these at a level that wouldn’t make sense for anyone else because we can amortize the investment and amplify its impact across all of your businesses.

There is also a set of optimizations that we can’t do without partners. A few weeks ago, we launched our Enhanced Issuer Network, which allows issuers to incorporate Stripe Radar scores into their own decisions to authorize or decline transactions. This is a first of its kind in the industry, and it’s early days, but we’re seeing remarkable impact already, an 8% reduction in fraud and a 1% to 2% uplift in auth rates.

We’re live now with two issuers, Capital One and Discover. We have six more already integrated, and we expect over a dozen live by the end of the year.

But none of what we just covered matters if we can’t provide you with a reliable platform. We target five 9s of reliability on an ongoing basis. That is no more than 26 seconds of downtime per month. And in fact, last year on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we hit six 9s while handling more than 20,000 requests per second.

Now, while we think of this as table stakes, we’ve actually heard from all of you that it’s one of the things that sets us apart.

So, with companies like these turning to Stripe, we’re now powering some of the most sophisticated enterprises in the world. And I’m excited to introduce one of them. Please welcome Dave Nicholls, the head of payments, business development at Uber.

DAVE NICHOLLS: Good morning, everyone. So, Uber is a huge marketplace with payments at the core of what we like to call our magical experience. We’re in 70 countries, accept 52 different payment instruments, and move close to $100 billion annually in almost real time between spenders and earners across those 70 countries.

As a result, our awesome payments team, which I am proud to be part of, holds our partners to an incredibly high standard. We continuously test their performance in every market on auth rates, latency, cost, reporting, and relationship management.

We’ve been working with Stripe now for three years, and to be candid, they have had to work hard to become one of our top partners. But what’s impressed us during the partnership is how closely the team listens, how fast they respond and rise to a challenge when working with Uber. And there’s no shortage of challenges when working with us.

Stripe now consistently scores top marks for performance across a number of categories, and we’re super excited to announce that we’re expanding our partnership.

Just this morning, we announced that Uber selected Link as the payment solution to give our millions of customers access to be able to pay with their bank account. We see the option of paying with a bank account across many of our global markets as a crucial way to pay for our services both now and into the future. And the fact that Stripe has made this as quick and easy as using a card and that they’ve got a huge merchant base that can drive real network effects for the adoption of this payment method has made the solution highly compelling for us.

We needed an innovator that we could trust with the Uber magical experience, and Stripe ticked the boxes. So, we’re really excited about the future of this partnership. Great work, Team Stripe. We’re looking forward to the future.

WILL GAYBRICK: Thank you so much, Dave. So, the deep partnership Dave just described actually generalizes. It’s how we think about working with all of you. What drives us is the sophistication of your businesses, the features that you ask for, and the scale at which you all are operating.

You all push us to get better and thus you create a better Stripe for everyone. An optimized checkout, truly unified omnichannel experiences, and the most feature-rich and performant payments platform. These ladder up to a boatload more revenue, and they free up your resources to serve your customers better and better each day.

So, that’s what we’ve been up to in payments. As I mentioned, the throughline of everything we do. But now let’s get onto the rest, and for that, here’s Tanya.

TANYA KHAKBAZ: So, we just talked about global payments. We didn’t spend enough time talking about Will’s mustache, but there’s a breakout for that later.

Will talked about the power of Stripe Payments for growing your business. Now let’s go one layer out of the onion. What if your goal is to help your users grow their business? Stripe Connect launched in 2012 as the first easy way to enable just this. Today, Connect powers over 12,000 platforms and marketplaces. Everyone from Shopify and Lightspeed to Mindbody and DoorDash. Let’s hear what’s new.

ALEX VOGENTHALER: Stripe’s most important strategic insight is that we shouldn’t just build for specific use cases. As software digitizes the whole economy, thousands of companies will need to integrate financial capabilities into their products.

Stripe Connect is our way to give you our capabilities so that you can build first-class experiences across every imaginable market.

As Tanya said, a lot of companies are doing this, and they’re seeing amazing results because they participate financially in all of the economic activity they enable.

Take these three public market software platforms. In 2022, they reported that they earned the majority of their revenue, 51% of all their revenue, from their integrated payments services. Integrated payments are succeeding in the market because they make for better customer experiences.

For example, my local yoga studio runs on Mindbody, which is built on Stripe Connect, okay. That’s me, and Tanya swore it would not end up in the keynote. So, next slide.

Let’s get back on track here. We’ll talk later.

In a single app powered by Mindbody and Stripe Connect, I can book a class and automatically pay with my card on file. When I walk into the studio, the instructor sees that I’ve already paid, no friction, no other processes to deal with. It’s great for me, the instructor, the yoga studio, and Mindbody. Everyone wins.

This fully integrated model is so successful that vertical software platforms are now powering virtually every corner of the economy, from hair salons to coffee shops to ecommerce platforms to bookkeepers. Despite that incredible diversity, what they have in common is that they typically run on Stripe Connect, for good reasons.

One, platforms that use Connect get to market at least a year faster on average than on alternatives because Connect provides so much functionality out of the box.

Two, they make more money because with Connect, they can monetize not only online card payments but also local payment methods, in-person payments, payouts, card programs, and more.

Three, these platforms see superior user retention because they can build deep, multiproduct relationships on top of Connect.

Now, that said, the most consistent feedback we hear from you is that there’s a painful decision you have to confront, a standard experience you can launch almost immediately or a deeply customized experience that does everything you want but takes much more time and investment to build.

Roshan is going to help me demonstrate major updates that eliminate this tradeoff. These are the largest ever improvements to Stripe Connect.

ROSHAN SADANANI: Thanks, Alex. Let me introduce you to Homebox, a fictional platform for home service workers like electricians. Homebox is great at helping electricians book appointments and manage their business, but building payment experiences like dispute management is not really their expertise.

You’ve told us time and again you want us to build—you want to build deeply white-labeled payments products but without all of the work involved. So, today we’re announcing Connect embedded components to help you do just that.

You can copy and paste these prebuilt components into your websites, turning a yearlong project for a full team into just a few days of work for one engineer. And getting to market even faster.

Let’s see how this would look for an electrician who runs their business on Homebox. If we log in here, on the payments tab, they can view and filter payments and even export to a CSV.

ALEX VOGENTHALER: So, we’re in a Homebox, meaning platform website. We’re not on the Stripe Dashboard. But Roshan, can you show us how much of this UI is provided by Stripe?

ROSHAN SADANANI: Definitely. Everything you see in the dashed lines here, all of it is an embedded component that is prebuilt by Stripe. And it’s not static. Homebox’s users can view payment details, send refunds, and even manage and counter disputes.

ALEX VOGENTHALER: So, with Connect, you now get complex workflows like refunds and disputes prebuilt right out of the box. But Roshan, our users want their payments experience to be truly, deeply white labeled, so we need to make this look a little bit better with the Homebox style.

ROSHAN SADANANI: I’d agree. Why don’t we fix that? Right in the Stripe docs, we can preview components and customize colors, style, and font. Let’s make this look like Homebox. We’ll start by updating some of our button colors. And why don’t we get those success badges to match the Homebox screen as well?

I think Homebox likes slightly more rounded buttons, so we’ll round that out here. And that looks about right.

Stripe auto-generates the code for us, so all we have to do is copy this into our dashboard, save the result, and refresh Homebox. And boom, we now have a fully white-labeled experience. Again, now possible in hours or really minutes instead of months or even years.

ALEX VOGENTHALER: Yeah.

ROSHAN SADANANI: That’s cool.

ALEX VOGENTHALER: I think—I think they liked your demo.

Connect embedded components are live with beta users in production now, and they’re going to be rolling out broadly later this year.

All of your users need to see what they’ve earned and when they’ll be paid, but they’re incredibly varied when it comes to solutions they use for things like accounting, marketing, and business intelligence. When these products don’t all work in concert, the day-to-day friction can be pretty awful.

Last year at Stripe Sessions, we launched the Stripe App Marketplace to address these frictions for you. For example, the Mailchimp Stripe app lets you see the relationship between your email marketing campaigns and your online sales right in the Stripe Dashboard. Stripe Apps are now fully live, with about 100 third-party apps and hundreds more custom-built by many of you for your own use.

Now we’re bringing two awesome ideas together: the embedded components that Roshan helped me demo and the Stripe App Marketplace to solve those day-to-day cross-product frictions for your users.

It’s still early days, but with Xero as our first partner, we’re going to be enabling you to offer third-party apps in your dashboard to your users. Here, you can see an electrician viewing available apps, taking a look at Xero, installing it within their Homebox dashboard, and then they can see when transactions from Homebox have been synced into their books stored in Xero.

So, we’ve talked about how platforms like Homebox can use Connect’s embedded components to go live fast while still delivering a deep and fully white-labeled payments experience. Now, let’s move on to improvements that help platforms implement their monetization strategy.

I bet contractors running on Homebox would like to offer buy now, pay later options like say Klarna, because this would enable homeowners to book bigger projects. And Homebox should be able to monetize that at a higher rate than cards because Klarna will increase revenue for the contractors.

So, Roshan, can you show us a way for Homebox to monetize Klarna as a payment method without having to write any code?

ROSHAN SADANANI: Sure. Let’s do it. Here, I am logged into the Stripe Dashboard as Homebox. Today, we’re also announcing brand-new pricing tools. We’ve made it just a few clicks to set conditional prices like a custom fee for Klarna. We can do that by adding a pricing rule, choosing Klarna, and then setting the rate we want. And that’s it. It’s never been easier for you to set and experiment with pricing strategies.

ALEX VOGENTHALER: The opportunity for monetizing financial services on your platform doesn’t end with collecting payments. Let’s quickly talk about payouts.

82% of SMBs experience cash flow issues, so of course, platforms like Homebox want to help their users get paid faster. And this is easy to monetize via Connect.

ROSHAN SADANANI: That’s right. With Instant Payouts, your users can get funds into their account in minutes, not days, and typically for an incremental fee.

Now with the Dashboard, Homebox can set and experiment with instant payout fees. And those fees will be automatically deducted from the payout and deposited to Homebox’s platform balance, making reconciliation a snap.

ALEX VOGENTHALER: So, Connect also enables you to offer and monetize real-world payments. You’ve already been able to deploy Stripe Terminal hardware to your Connect merchants, and now that includes the S700 device that you saw Katie demo earlier.

For use cases though where a dedicated device isn’t appropriate, say the school craft fair, you can now allow your merchants to collect payments with their phones.

Stripe was the first payments provider to offer Tap to Pay on iPhone, and we launched Tap to Pay on Android just months later. Platforms have added Tap to Pay to their integrations in as little as two weeks. Your users simply update your mobile app, and they’re ready to go. So, Roshan, let’s show them how it works.

ROSHAN SADANANI: I’d love to. All right. So, let’s see what this might look like if I’m an electrician using Homebox, to stick with our analogy here. First, Homebox sends me an email that looks like this, explaining that if I update my Homebox app on my phone, I can accept contactless payments with only my iPhone and no extra hardware. So, why don’t we see how it looks?

This is a normal iPhone, and we’re going to run an example here. All I need to do is open the Homebox app, enable Tap to Pay on iPhone, and take my payment. And that’s it. Convenient for me.

It’s pretty great. So, yeah. That’s really convenient for me as an electrician and even more convenient for the platform like Homebox to enable.

ALEX VOGENTHALER: Awesome. Thank you so much, Roshan.

ROSHAN SADANANI: Thanks.

ALEX VOGENTHALER: So, Stripe Connect plus Stripe Terminal is just one of many power couples. Connect plus Capital allows you to lend to your users. Stripe Connect plus Stripe Treasury enables you to offer bank account replacements to your users. And of course, there’s Connect plus Stripe Issuing for you to offer card programs to your users.

We launched issuing five years ago, and today it’s one of Stripe’s fastest growing products. Since launch, over 100 million cards have been issued, and it’s used by fintechs like Navan and Ramp, platforms like Shopify and Housecall Pro, and Issuing has really matured and can now support a multitude of configurations. Fleet and fuel cards, travel and expense cards, fulfillment cards for gig workers, credit or debit or prepaid, and more. Each of these pairings with Connect is powerful, but the biggest opportunity is offering multiple products together.

Now, imagine if one of your users, all on your platform, was collecting payments with you, receiving a capital loan through you, storing funds in a Treasury-backed account with you, spending on cards you issued, and withdrawing funds via Instant Payouts. That’s an incredibly broad and deep relationship with that user of yours.

Okay. Hopefully we’ve left you with a few clear takeaways here. One, how much quicker it is to get to market with Connect, how rich the monetization opportunities are both for platforms and fintechs building on Stripe, and three, how much stickier your platform can be when you use these services to build deep, multipronged relationships with your users.

There’s one final thing I want to add. We’ve recently made major improvements to enable Connect to adapt and grow with you as you grow. Over time, if you want to build your own entirely custom dashboard on top of Stripe’s raw APIs, you can. If you want to run your own merchant onboarding and risk management program, you can. If you want to control all of your own pricing logic down at the transactional level, you can. None of that happened accidentally. We’ve built specific new functionality to enable you to outsource any of those jobs to Stripe Connect or take them in-house when the time is right. And no matter what you choose, you can change your mind later.

Okay. One thing we’ve learned over the last few years is that almost every company has a Connect use case. At some level, every company needs to orchestrate money movements across multiple parties. It’s not just for marketplaces and software platforms. It’s also for some of the world’s most longstanding enterprises. So, let’s head to Tokyo to learn more.

TOMOAKI NAKATANI: Toyota has a mission to support the entire automobile maintenance industry and promote sustainability. Mechacomi is our platform where local repair shops can share and reuse the specialized equipment required to service modern vehicles.

The service allows auto-repair shops to buy and sell equipment directly to other shops. Toyota chose Stripe for two reasons.

One is that it does not take much time to implement, so we could build something new very quickly.

The second reason is so when the service expands in the future, the platform will be able to accommodate many different payment methods.

Our team set a goal of having the service live in 6 months, but we didn’t know if we would be able to do that. We ended up moving so quickly that many colleagues around me said, “I’ve never heard of such a fast development time at Toyota.”

With Stripe Connect, Toyota was able to quickly set up a platform to handle complex, third-party payments. The money flows to the seller at the time the buyer receives the product.

In the future, we hope our Mechacomi platform will become a total service that supports Toyota’s transformation into a mobility company and we think that using Stripe is the best way to do that.

TANYA KHAKBAZ: Everyone from Toyota to Lightspeed can monetize payments with Connect. Now let’s talk about an opportunity that’s just as ubiquitous, managing your revenue.

When we started Stripe, we were focused on payments, and from intently listening to all of you, it became clear you also wanted help managing your recurring revenue. So, we launched Stripe Billing, which now has over 200,000 users and powers the biggest SaaS and subscription companies in the world.

After launching Billing, we heard more related asks from you. Just as recurring billing involves some calculation around a payment, so does sales tax. So, we built Stripe Tax. And we kept learning more about your needs in this area.

What’s now become clear is that these individual asks point to a broader need. As your business models get more complex and you operate in more countries, you need a revenue stack that’s modular, flexible, and fully automated. It’s taken us a few years to see this, but it’s now clear that we’re on the precipice of an industry transformation as big as the move to cloud computing.

Here’s Vivek to explain what we mean and what we’re doing.

VIVEK SHARMA: Having spent the better part of two decades at Microsoft, some of that working on Office 365, I can tell you the cloud computing analogy rings true. Now, I’ve spoken to a lot of you since I started at Stripe last year, and I’ve heard that we are undergoing structural industry changes that demand our attention.

Your businesses are operating in more markets. You’re also facing more fractured regulatory requirements like collecting different sales tax rates across different states and countries. And on top of this, you’re implementing more sophisticated sales motions and combining complex enterprise deals with self-serve models.

Now, this all puts a lot of stress on the back office. How do you manage and orchestrate all of this? You, our most sophisticated customers, are telling us that there’s a big gap here.

Now, moving money is the easy problem. All of the orchestration around what to move is the hard part. So, we’ve decided to tackle it by building the suite of tools to deliver a modern finance stack. We call it Money 365.

Just kidding.

We call it our revenue and finance automation suite. It sounds prosaic, but we think getting it right will be a very big deal.

Today, it’s shocking how frequently we hear stories from you like, oh, you know, we’d like to make this self-serve, but it’s too complicated, or we’d like to sell in India, but we don’t think we can handle the cross-border issues.

The global economy is surprisingly stymied by basic mechanical limitations here. And what I keep hearing is that you want a coherent system to handle your entire cash flow life cycle. And you want these capabilities to work seamlessly with your ERP, your CRM, and your data warehouse. And you want it to be interoperable with your other finance and accounting tools. This is what we’re solving with our revenue and finance automation suite.

Now, let’s see what it looks like through the eyes of a SaaS company we invented called Cloudly. Cloudly runs project management software for enterprise businesses, and their fictional CFO joins us now.

MEREDITH NEYRAND: So, Cloudly needs to serve businesses of all sizes with a host of different pricing models. With Stripe Billing, we can manage recurring revenue plans for virtually any pricing model—seat-based, usage-based, tiered, you name it.

We can also send one-off or recurring online invoices with Stripe Invoicing. And as we expand into more markets, we’re running into ludicrously complex tax rules and headaches. Stripe Tax takes all of that away from us, streamlining sales tax, VAT, GST in over 40 countries.

And because I’m a stickler for accrual accounting, and let’s be real, who among us isn’t, I can automate all of that away with Stripe Revenue Recognition.

And finally, Stripe Data Pipeline. With that, I can sync my Stripe data with Cloudly’s other data in our data warehouse.

VIVEK SHARMA: So, from acquiring customers to collecting payment to reporting on their data, Cloudly can rely on Stripe to manage their entire revenue life cycle in a single end-to-end system. And we want to be very transparent. Some of the products in this suite are quite mature. And some are more nascent because we’re building quickly. But our investment in this area is very serious. It’s why I joined. And we’re incredibly enthusiastic about our traction with customers like Slack, Cloudflare, and Atlassian.

Just last week, we launched a bunch of new features. Billing users can now create and automate complex changes to subscriptions over time. Tax is now available by API, so you can automate away your tax calculations right now, no matter your payments or your billing setup. Our new revenue reporting product makes it super easy to get a snapshot of key financial metrics. And we announced automatic reconciliation of orders, transactions, and bank deposits so that monthly chore is now automated daily.

So, if you’re a rapidly growing startup like Midjourney, you can run your entire business on Stripe’s revenue and rinance automation tools. And if you’re an established company like The Atlantic, you can use whatever parts of the suite are most useful to you, knowing that our tools will play nicely with your tools.

Now, there are very many—there are many more powerful features included in our revenue and finance automation suite. We’re just not going to have time to cover it all here. Luckily, we’ll have an entire breakout session dedicated to just this topic later today.

The great thing about integrating all of your data in this way is what can then easily be done on top of it.

MEREDITH NEYRAND: Yeah, exactly. So, what if Cloudly now wants to dig into their data for insights on how they can grow—sorry. Sorry about that. Oh, that’s my CEO. Actually, this is a perfect example of what you might be using Stripe Sigma for.

Now, if you haven’t used Sigma yet, it’s a tool that lets you use SQL to analyze your Stripe data for business insights. So, what if I need to respond to this type of request urgently and don’t know how to write SQL queries, which is the reality for many of us? What if instead, I was able to talk to Sigma using natural language? Well, let’s try this now. And this is going to be live, so we’re really going to hope it’s going to work.

All right. Let’s try this:

Show details for past-due invoices that are not paid yet.

There you go.

As you may have guessed, this is using a large language model to interpret my question. This particular LLM, though, has been trained on Sigma’s table schema and is now able to determine which tables and fields are needed to get my query. And there we go. We have the query. Let’s go ahead and quickly run it. And this is how you can see it’s a live demo. It takes some time to run the query. And there we have it.

If I don’t know SQL, I can now easily get results. And if I’m an SQL expert, I can still save valuable time.

Let me actually try and dig one level deeper and get to the question that my CEO was just asking about. Let’s try this:

Show details of customers with these unpaid invoices and group by amount.

Now, the really powerful thing here is that the assistant maintains context from one prompt to another. In this case, I am able to reference the previous result and dive deeper into the tables to get the results that I’m looking for.

There we go. It’s just coming up with the query right now. And really, the exciting thing here is we did this with invoicing, but you could just as well imagine doing the same thing with fraud, customer churn, or any other query that you’re interested in.

And here it is. In less than a minute, we were able to get the answer that we were looking for and that without writing a single line of code or query ourselves. All right.

I’m going to take—

I’m going to be taking off my Cloudly hat for one second and putting my Stripe hat back on. We’ll be releasing this new assistant to Sigma later this year and can’t wait to empower more people to turn their data into insights.

VIVEK SHARMA: Thank you, Meredith. So, the point from what you just saw isn’t that AI writing SQL is profound, though it’s neat. The point is that having a unified revenue stack makes it easier to go from messy spreadsheets to fully automated real-time computation. By relocating a ton of your back-office work into Stripe’s basement, you can bring technology to bear to solve finance problems. Now, this is how things should work. I’m very excited about our roadmap here, and I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback as we make more progress.

To talk about the value of replacing fragmented legacy systems with a unified, modern stack, please welcome the SVP of engineering at Ritchie Bros., the world’s largest heavy-equipment auctioneer, Ranbir Chawla.

RANBIR CHAWLA: Nice to see you, man.

VIVEK SHARMA: Welcome, welcome.

So, Ranbir, Ritchie Bros. is a market with sort of things like heavy machinery, tractors, and bulldozers. What are some of your goals in partnering with Stripe?

RANBIR CHAWLA: Yeah, so, you know, think of us as the eBay of heavy equipment, right? But we’re also a 50-year-old company that has grown over time through acquisition. So, we have a couple of different properties we have bought. Now we own analytics companies. We own parts and attachment companies. We own all this. So, how do we build a condensed marketplace across all of our properties, across all of our equipment, and create a new digital environment, right? How do we digitally disrupt an industry that is frankly not very technical?

So, our goal was to think about how to build that global marketplace and not have to concentrate on things like payments, things on money movement reconciliation. Find an expert disruptive partner to help us go globally in that space so we can concentrate on writing the code that makes us Ritchie Bros., right, that are hyper-customer focused, you know, high results for our customers, focus on those things in technology and not focus on the stuff that you do well. How to partner in that is really the goal.

VIVEK SHARMA: I love hearing about the scope and scale of your business. What made Stripe the best partner for your needs?

RANBIR CHAWLA: Yeah, I think it’s a combination of again, like I said, you know, our growth opportunities are global, right? We are a global company now, but that’s where a lot of our work is. And as you know, payments are different depending on where you are in the world, right? I don’t want to obfuscate that technology from my own team, right? That’s number one.

Number two, we’re trying to disrupt an industry, so we wanted a disruptive partner, right? If you’re going to disrupt, bring another partner along with you to do that, right? Don’t go to some, you know, stodgy mainline company.

And the other piece is I’m taking a lot of folks, technology-wise, to a journey of going from a multimonolithic company to an API-driven platform. So, now I’m taking engineers on a journey of what does a good API look like?

Stripe offers me this fantastic opportunity of—to show these are beautifully made APIs. This is what good engineering looks like. So, the good engineering I see from Stripe is actually an example for my team. It lifts me up and my team up, interacting with that, and that was a key goal. That was one of the key reasons we selected Stripe.

VIVEK SHARMA: I have to say, you’re being very generous. I mean, the feedback has been great. What kind of outcomes are you seeing in your partnership?

RANBIR CHAWLA: It’s been great. I mean, it’s fast time to market, right? It’s our ability to integrate and think on new ideas. Part of our goal for this year was to really get efficient in our financial operations and the backend, right, in terms of, you know, as an auction house, we take money from buyers and pass it to sellers and take money in between. Automating that process was really easy, is an API-driven format. And it’s going to allow us to save millions of dollars in just money movement fees.

And the second piece is, again, as a semi-manual business, thinking about how we can do simple things like payments reconciliation. 700, 800, 900,000 transactions a year used to mean reconciling all of that manually, right? Now all of that manual reconciliation is gone. It’s all automated all the way through, from buyer to ERP. So, it’s fabulous from an efficiency standpoint.

VIVEK SHARMA: Thank you so much for your partnership, Ranbir.

RANBIR CHAWLA: Yeah.

VIVEK SHARMA: And thanks for being with us today.

RANBIR CHAWLA: Hey, no problem. Thank you.

EMILY SANDS: Well, if anyone here is in the market for a half-million-dollar dump truck, I think you found your guy. Let’s talk about how we’re helping your engineering teams ship faster.

First up, we’ve been building a bunch of things so you don’t have to. In fact, over half of the businesses getting started on Stripe today begin their journey with integrations that involve zero code. That’s right, no code.

Maybe you want to get the first revenue dollar in for a new idea. You can share a no-code payment link. Or maybe you want to quickly accept payments on your website. Just use the no-code pricing table or new buy buttons.

Want to give your customers the freedom to manage their subscriptions? We built this no-code customer portal. No-code tools like these are helping Midjourney, ServiceNow, and you get started in an instant.

We’re also making it easier to scale and customize your integrations with two new developer tools, DocsAI and Workbench. Let’s take a sneak peek.

We know how much you value clear and intuitive documentation, so when we started experimenting with large language models, we realized, hey, let’s let you talk to the docs. To see DocsAI in action, we’ll meet one of our Cloudly developers. Hey, MG.

MICHAEL GLUKHOVSKY: Hi, Emily. My CFO wants to automatically calculate tax on our monthly invoices. As their developer, I can ask Stripe’s LLM-powered documentation, how do I add tax to my invoices using the API?

I can ask natural language questions and DocsAI provides a concise summary. So, I get to spend less time reading and more time building.

DocsAI lets me know that I should use the automatic tax parameter to get started.

EMILY SANDS: Nice. We surveyed you as part of our developer coefficient study and heard that, on average, 41% of developers’ time is spent on bugs, maintenance, and tech debt rather than on features. So, we built Workbench. It’s a universal set of developer tools that make it easier to debug, maintain, and grow your integration.

MG, how are those invoices looking?

MICHAEL GLUKHOVSKY: Well, DocsAI pointed me in the right direction. You can see that I added the automatic tax parameter right here in my code. I’m super excited to try the Workbench though. Let’s see how my code’s doing and how our integration is.

So, I can summon Workbench anywhere within Stripe’s Dashboard or documentation. I immediately see an overview of our integration with some suggested improvements. Oh, it looks like we have an error. Let’s dig into what happened.

Hmm. It seems like we can’t tax some customers who are missing addresses. We’ll need an address to look up a tax rate for their invoice. I can see the request logs, but I think I know what to do.

I like to start just with one customer to experiment by fixing this in my code. We’re then going to also fetch the latest address from our database and give it to Stripe. I’m going to run our code. And there are the latest requests. I think that worked. I can then check the invoice right here within Workbench. And we can see that Stripe automatically calculated the tax based on the addresses.

That took way less time to debug than usual. No more flipping between my docs, my editors, and my dashboards.

EMILY SANDS: Love it. Well done.

So, as any developer knows, dev tools in the browsers changed the game overnight. With Workbench, we want to do the same for APIs. Workbench is chock-full of tools to help developers and has plenty more on the way. To sign up for the beta, you can head to workbench.stripe.dev.

Stripe first found product-market fit by putting what developers need front and center, and we’ll continue investing in tools that empower your developers to spend more of their time building your business.

PATRICK COLLISON: All right. That was a breakneck run-through of what we’ve been working on, and I hope you found it useful. So, to recap, here is a quick summary of the new functionality that we spoke about today across Payments, Connect, and revenue and finance automation.

And to zoom it out, we’re big fans of the prosperity that the commercial world can bring to the lives of people all around the world. You’ll see this woven into our mission and in some of the Stripe Press books you’ll find for sale over in the Tap to Pay Lounge and our general belief in the value of entrepreneurship and in reducing barriers to global trade.

It’s also true at the tactical level. Stripe is an engine to help you grow your revenue and to reduce your costs and hopefully to help ensure that you have the freedom to invest in your next market expansion, you know, some new product, your next business model innovation, or maybe just some crazy new experiment.

And as we think about our next ideas, you know, please share your feedback and your thoughts. There are several hundred Stripe employees here today. We really want to hear from you. One of the main purposes of Sessions is for us to have the opportunity to have a direct dialogue with all of you.

Now, like a lot of folks here, we’re big fans of Warren and Charlie. And in fact, we’re delighted to be reprinting later this year, Charlie’s famous almanac with Stripe Press. And you know, Sessions is not quite “Woodstock for capitalists.” You know, that’s in Omaha later this week. But maybe Sessions can be a kind of small demo day for capitalism.

I want to say thank you to our sponsors and to our partners for helping us to put the event together. And thank all of you for taking the time to be here. This is a remarkable moment in the history of the internet economy. The world should be a lot more prosperous than it is, and you will hopefully help make that happen.

We’re honored to have the opportunity to support you, all of you, in your growth to come. Thank you.