EEKE DE MILLIANO: You can’t talk about global commerce without talking about barriers to trade. Now, I realize that this topic is dominating all of your news feeds right now, but do not worry, I am not here to talk about tariffs. What I want to talk about is something that impacts global trade in maybe a little bit more of an obscure way, but I think equally important—payment methods. Specifically, I will be sharing how I think real-time payments and stablecoins reduce barriers to global trade. And I want to focus on that today because not only do I believe that the adoption of these payment methods is going to drastically boost the overall online economy, for individual businesses, businesses like yours, you’ll want to think about supporting these payment methods as you think about growing your global footprint. 

But before we dive into the nitty-gritty of instant settlement and crypto, I actually want to start with a story from my home country, the Netherlands, and how one small idea there changed the world forever. It’s the early 1600s, and imagine that you are a young entrepreneur with a bold idea—send ships halfway across the globe to trade spices. There’s just one small problem. You need millions of dollars before you can ever send these ships out of the harbor. And getting that kind of funding, it really is impossible, because back then, businesses could really only raise from a handful of wealthy individuals. There are no banks, there’s no venture capital, there’s no crowdfunding. 

So enter the Dutch East India Company. They had a radical idea—what if anyone could invest? And so they created something that the world had never seen before, the stock market. For the first time, regular citizens, shopkeepers, farmers, artisans—they could buy shares in these new ships. And this drastically lowered the barriers to capital, unleashed new funding, and sparked a wave of innovation. Suddenly there was more trade, more ideas, more exchange. And what I actually think is astounding is that this wasn’t just happening in business—it was in the arts and sciences, too. We probably would not have Rembrandt’s The Night Watch without all that financial grease in the system. 

The lesson is clear: reducing barriers to commerce leads to massive economic growth. And this is our job at Stripe. This is why my team exists. We wake up every morning building tools to help businesses like yours grow without letting things like payments and compliance and financial operations get in the way. Stripe’s mission is simple but ambitious. It’s to increase the GDP of the internet. And because the internet is inherently global, global commerce is an increasingly important piece of that mission. In fact, Stripe’s cross-border volume has grown over 40% since 2018, and we expect that trend to continue. 

Now, there’s one catch: today’s barriers to global trade are not really getting any better. Now, back when the Dutch East India Company was trying to enable global commerce, your biggest risk was pirates. Today, it’s your payments getting stuck in processing for five days while you refresh your banking app like a maniac. Maybe pirates were actually faster at getting to move these treasures across borders. In some instances, a cross-border payment today can still cost up to 10 times more than a domestic payment with long processing times, currency conversion, and dealing with multiple intermediaries. 

Let’s take cards, for example. In the United States, cards dominate. They’re by far the most proper way to pay. But that’s just not true of everywhere where many of you are probably doing business. In Germany, for example, cards only account for about 12% of transactions. You heard that right, just 12%. And even in markets where cards are widely used, like in the UK, they are still really expensive once you want to go cross-border. Now, why is that? It’s because most of the world’s payment systems were designed decades ago, long before the internet existed. So we spent years trying to make these old systems work for a digital global economy that they were never built for. 

Here’s the good news, though. Today, for the first time in decades, we are standing at the edge of something new. Two technologies, real-time payments and stablecoins, are finally giving us financial infrastructure designed for the internet economy. So let’s start with real-time payments. We’ve all heard about them. They’re as cheap as traditional bank methods, but unlike traditional bank methods, they’re instant. So when the money is sent by a buyer, you’re instantly receiving those funds as a merchant. Today around 100 countries have launched real-time payment systems. 

And many of them rolled out around the iPhone, which really brought with it a lot of advantages, because being mobile-native unlocked two critical features. First, user experience. Mobile phones make it just so easy to pay right from your pocket without needing to pull out a laptop or run into a bank. And then, second—security. Mobile devices make identity verification seamless. Think fingerprint scans, facial recognition. So together—instant settlement, user experience, and security—they’re really setting the stage for real-time payments to scale faster than anything we’ve ever seen before with cards. 

Now, you all have probably seen all of the adoption curves of real-time payments, but when I look at these numbers, they truly still astound me. By 2028, real-time payments are expected to account for almost a third—a third—of all electronic payments. I think that’s just amazing. In Brazil, for example, Pix went from an idea to a dominant payment method in just two years. Over $4 trillion have been moved on Pix. So when I see results like that, I’m like, of course, it’s intuitive. We should be offering real-time payments wherever it makes sense. But then we looked at the Stripe data for Stripe businesses, and the impact of real-time payments on sales has been even bigger than we initially expected. In Switzerland, offering TWINT boosts conversion by 26%. In the Netherlands, offering iDEAL drives 39% uplift. And then in Poland, offering BLIK lifts conversion by 46%. 

Now, it’s not all smooth sailing with real-time payments. While they are growing very fast, many of them are still local, meaning that they’re built to serve a single country or a region, but not the entire world. And I don’t think that fragmentation, frankly, is really going to go away anytime soon. In fact, many governments may actually seek more control over their domestic financial systems over time. 

But we are seeing three pretty promising paths to globalized real-time payments. One path is expanding domestic solutions into new markets. So if we take Vipps, which is a very popular Norwegian payment method, they are now expanding to many other parts in Scandinavia. Another route is bilateral agreements to enable cross-border functionality. India’s UPI is a fantastic example of that. They’re now serving Indian travelers in Singapore and Malaysia and Sri Lanka and Nepal. And then for a truly unified approach, there’s interoperability. In Europe, leading mobile payment providers are working together to create a common framework for mobile payments. 

With all that said, I do think we should be realistic because, let’s be real, getting dozens of countries to align on anything is virtually impossible—let alone how they’re going to manage and move their money. Frankly, it’s kind of a miracle that Visa and Mastercard were able to pull this off for cards in the 20th century. I truly believe that because of their global ubiquity, it’s still such a good product. So while we believe that real-time payments will keep growing, we also think that they’ll remain fragmented for the foreseeable future. 

And that is where stablecoins come in. If real-time payments are like beautiful, high-speed trains, but each country has their own tracks and you have to sort of get off one train and on to another every time you want to cross the border, stablecoins are more like supersonic airline networks. Now I know crypto brings a lot of baggage with it, but what I think is amazing about stablecoins specifically is that they’re 24/7, they’re global and they’re programmable. 

Seriously, it’s kind of crazy to think about the nonstablecoin financial world. Like, we’re always online. You can send a meme at 3:00 a.m., even if you probably shouldn’t. But try to send a wire transfer on a Saturday. Good luck, because the banks are closed on the weekend. Stablecoins are different. They’re building a new financial backend from scratch, designed for a world that’s always online. They’re also tied to a currency that we already use every day, like the US dollar, which makes stablecoins just as reliable as cash—exactly the thing that you want when you’re moving real money. 

And while it might feel like stablecoins exploded into the scene overnight, they have really been quietly growing over the past few years. Today’s stablecoin transaction volume is approaching a trillion dollars. In a recent survey, we actually found that 25%—so 1 in 4 businesses processing cross-border payments—are already thinking about using stablecoins. We see stablecoins show up in three major use cases. First, people are using stablecoins simply to make payments. Take Turkey, for example. Inflation there is hovering around a staggering 40%. So I don’t think it’s really any surprise that last March, stablecoin purchases were worth 4.3% of Turkey’s entire GDP. Beyond Turkey, they’re also sort of the simpler and faster and cheaper way to move money across borders than traditional payment systems. 

Second, there’s money movement. If you’re running a global business with local entities and dozens of bank accounts, stablecoins let you bring revenue home faster and with lower fees. And then third, for payouts, Remote—a global HR platform—now lets customers pay contractors directly with USDC in over 69 countries. As with anything new, there are still real hurdles. The first big one is customer protection. If you buy something with a credit card and something goes wrong, you can file a chargeback. Not so much with stablecoins. Once the money is gone, it is gone. No one wants to take that risk if there’s a better alternative. 

And then the second problem with stablecoins is reputation. Crypto headlines have not always been, shall we say, the most confidence inspiring. Terms like “insolvency” and “fraud” don’t exactly scream, “Trust me with your money.” But here’s the good news. Because stablecoins are programmable, businesses can build rules around them. And with the right guardrails, the ecosystem can become even safer than today’s traditional payments. And regulation is also catching up. Governments across Europe and Africa are setting clear rules around things like reserves and anti-money laundering. And closer to home, a stablecoin regulatory framework is expected to pass in Congress later this year. 

So if you look at all of this combined, I can really see a future, maybe a decade from now, where stablecoins are how most online money moves. Fast, reliable, global, exactly how the internet itself already works. Both real-time payments and stablecoins are lowering the barriers to global commerce. Real-time payments are taking off, especially in countries like Brazil and India, but also across regions like Europe and Southeast Asia. And if you’re selling into these countries, you’re leaving serious money off the table if you don’t offer them. 

Stablecoins, meanwhile, bring something even more new. They aren’t just fast, they truly are global from the start. Now, today, these two innovations are growing really side by side, but I think the real opportunity is what happens when they come together. Real-time payments are laying the groundwork country by country, and stablecoins are stitching those countries together into a truly global network. And just like in the days when new financial ideas helped unlock that first golden age of global trade in the Netherlands, we are standing at the edge of something just as transformational. The pirates may be gone, mostly. The ships look different—think code, not wood. But that spirit of exploration, of building new pathways to unlock global trade, that is so, so alive. 

And we’re not doing it alone. We have incredible partners across the ecosystem, from platforms to merchants to regulators. They’re all helping to shape this next era of globalization. Which is why I’m so excited to welcome leaders from Shopify and Duolingo to the stage to tell us more. [Applause] 

Rohit and Guillaume, welcome. 

ROHIT MISHRA: Thank you.

GUILLAUME DE CANNART: Thank you. Good to be here.

EEKE DE MILLIANO: I am so thrilled to have you both here. Maybe by very quick way of introduction, Rohit is the director of product at Shopify for payments and cross-border. He’s been at Shopify for almost a decade, he was telling me. He’s worked on everything from Shopify markets to platforms to tax and compliance. I think you could safely say he might be the physical instantiation of Shopify right here. And then we have Guillaume, who’s a product manager at Duolingo. He’s worked on a number of different products there. Now he works on user growth. He was also an electronics system design engineer at Tesla and a performance engineer at NVIDIA. So we have to talk about both those companies maybe at some point later, maybe not in this talk. Also, thank you for building the product that finally convinced my husband that he needs to learn Dutch. Welcome, both of you. 

Now I know this talk is all about global payments, but it feels a little blasphemous not to start with maybe an AI question because both of your founders have been very vocal proponents of AI. How is that practically showing up in your day-to-day? 

ROHIT MISHRA: Yeah, I think AI has gone from “must-tinker-on-the-side” to a day-to-day part of the job. Tobi, Shopify’s founder and CEO, sent a now-famous note on XNote about how AI needs to be part of everyone’s day-to-day workflows. And we’re seeing some incredible changes in the team now over the last few months. We are now seeing, you know, the traditional work of, “I want to do this marketing campaign, but I am waiting on a data scientist to give me that segment.” Now marketers are just opening Cursor and using our in-house MCP to figure out their segment and sending out those campaigns.

So things that would have taken a lot more time are happening much faster. We are seeing PMs, instead of waxing eloquent with words, now open v0 and come up with mocks that they’re leveraging with design. And so overall, I think this is a fascinating time to be working in this space and leveraging all these tools. 

EEKE DE MILLIANO: Yeah, it’s truly amazing. We had a hackathon with PMs, and in three hours, they built entire prototypes. No designers, no engineers. It was amazing. Guillaume. 

GUILLAUME DE CANNART: Yeah. Our CEO also sent a nice message on LinkedIn about AI, going AI first. I love that we’re starting with this, how I’m going to lose my job. But no, so that was not the message. And he actually told us afterwards that it was somewhat misinterpreted. It’s not about losing jobs. Everyone is staying at the company. It’s really about getting to our mission much faster than we are going to, which is a great thing. We’re trying to bring accessible education to the world, and it’s a really long process with a lot of content. So what AI first means for us is really using all those tools to get there, hopefully 10 times faster, and to supercharge every single person at the company. So dream bigger, do more, and yeah, get there faster. 

EEKE DE MILLIANO: Dream bigger, do more. I love that. On to global payments. You both have, sort of, done a lot of work in this with your companies. Why is it so hard? 

ROHIT MISHRA: Yeah, I mean, I remember in 2018 at Shopify we were doing an internal employee conference. And you know, company born in Canada, US was our primary market. And we just wanted to almost shock-and-awe people at Shopify about... And so similar to your slide today, we had, you know, how payments work in Germany, and how your payments work in India, and how your payments work in Indonesia. And it’s almost like if you—you know, we sit and we talk about local payment methods. And one of the things that I almost always push back on—that word, because it’s only a very North American lens to say that’s a local payment method. 

EEKE DE MILLIANO: Yeah.

ROHIT MISHRA: If you are in the Netherlands, you think of the card as an alternative payment method. iDEAL in that case is your primary mechanism. Payment is part of the culture. It’s not a thing that we can homogenize across the world, just like there cannot be one homogeneous culture across the world. And so I think it’s the richness of commerce. And then, yes, everyone has their own unique flavor of it. That’s what makes our jobs complex and fun. 

EEKE DE MILLIANO: Yes, indeed. 

GUILLAUME DE CANNART: Yeah, I think likewise, when I—I’m not a payments expert by nature, but so I started working on payments, and I was super surprised to see how fragmented this landscape really is. It’s like every country does something different, and we want to make sure that our entire product flow is very seamless from end to end, so onboarding but also checkout. And that means bringing local payments where people are and making sure that they can purchase our products. So we want to make sure that everything that we have is accessible anywhere, and so that’s also in the checkout flow. 

Yeah, it’s really fascinating how every single country has their own real-time payment. And we’re still not quite there yet, but it’s cool to see Stripe working so hard on it. And it’s been really helpful for us to—for me not to have to become an absolute expert because Stripe is also there to do half of the work. So yeah, switching over to Stripe versus what we had before, it’s really great that you’re looking at this from a global perspective and not just like, “How does this work in America?” Because, yeah, we’re in like over 150 countries, and it’s a lot of work otherwise. 

EEKE DE MILLIANO: Yeah. Did you ever in a million years think you’d be building your career on payments? 

ROHIT MISHRA: Your sales team is recording and playing. 

EEKE DE MILLIANO: Yeah, exactly [laughs].

ROHIT MISHRA: [They’re the] last two minutes in every Stripe pitch deck [laughs]. 

EEKE DE MILLIANO: [Laughs] Yes, we promise [we] did not script [him]. So is it worth it? It’s just, you know, there’s a bunch of folks here in the room who are probably thinking about their payment stack. We’re all product builders. We have a thousand things to be building. When you think about, should I be putting X percent of my engineering and product resourcing time on building out these payment systems, how do you make that trade-off? How do you decide that this is important for your business? 

ROHIT MISHRA: Yeah, so we think about this now with Stripe. We have our Shopify Payments product that’s in over 39 countries now. And what we want to make sure is if, let’s say, just earlier this year, Stripe and Shopify teams worked on bringing BLIK and P24 to Poland. Poland is one of the fastest growing markets in Europe, just GDP-wise, also for us. And we cannot really expect a Polish merchant to take our offering seriously if we can say, “Hey, yes, we give you the online store. But in our case, that’s a credit card offering. Go figure out your local payment methods from somebody else.” 

And so we almost think of this as language localization, for example. Would you go and ever expect yourself to be successful in France without offering your product in French? Probably not. Hopefully not. And so similarly, as you go into all these different parts of the world, and if the ambition is to really succeed in those places, then we have to push ourselves and make sure that we are offering those. And, you know, we obviously have a great partnership, and Stripe does a lot of heavy lifting for us, which we are very glad for. And then we can do and—bring our layer on top and hopefully bring more of these payment methods to more places, including for, you know, as we build many of these things, it’s not just for the domestic market. It’s the Polish buyer now being able to use that for merchants worldwide, which is where there’s so much more network benefit that we can drive. 

EEKE DE MILLIANO: Yeah, totally. The network benefits are super interesting. 

GUILLAUME DE CANNART: Yeah, no, that’s a great analogy. It’s about localizing languages like payment methods. 

EEKE DE MILLIANO: Does that resonate with you from the Duolingo perspective [laughs]? 

GUILLAUME DE CANNART: Oh, yeah. I mean, we have part of our company, we send, like copy, that we write out to localizers. They localize it so we can serve it in any country. I’m sure it’s the same for all these companies as well. But it allows us to actually focus on our core mission and not on how to become the best payments provider in the world. So to answer your question, hopefully as little as 1% of the time we’d want to spend focusing on payments because then we can really focus on what we want to do. 

EEKE DE MILLIANO: Yeah, that’s a good segue. So let’s say all of these payments problems went away tomorrow, and you didn’t have to focus on payments. What would you be building next, your companies? What would you be focused on? 

ROHIT MISHRA: What are we building next? Oh, such an easy question. 

EEKE DE MILLIANO: Yes, [that] you can share, you know [laughs]? 

ROHIT MISHRA: I think one of the things that we’re really focused on is global commerce, especially in the climate of the day. That’s where we really see a lot of businesses on our platform looking for more solutions. So some of the stuff that was announced in the keynote today around having multicurrency balances, making sure that businesses have that flexibility, because I think both Stripe and Shopify share a core principle of leveling the playing field. And some of these things are historically only available—they have always been available. But if you’re a giant enterprise business, yes, you can have all these payout accounts and all these different issuing capabilities. 

But what we’d really love to achieve is, how can we bring that to every merchant everywhere in the world? And I think as pay-ins become more and more—as we make more progress there, then there’s obviously the next layer of commerce that is ripe for disruption, where we love to do more and level the playing field that way. 

EEKE DE MILLIANO: Yeah, amazing. Yeah, you were actually talking about how Duolingo’s thinking about, sort of, leveling the playing field as an important part of Duolingo. 

GUILLAUME DE CANNART: Yeah, exactly. I won’t spend too long on this because it’s actually a very similar response. I think it’s built like improving our products and improving access to them so that anyone can get access to education anywhere, enable more social movement, enable more opportunities, and just spend more time improving that process. 

ROHIT MISHRA: We should run a tracker of new payment methods being created, though. 

EEKE DE MILLIANO: Oh, say more? 

ROHIT MISHRA: You know, I think between... I feel like every year, I’m like, you know, there’s almost a pop quiz if you work in payments. Have you heard of this payment method? I’m like, I think I have, but have I? Is this one new? So it almost feels like kind of an infinite game, you know, figuring out [payments] and all the payment methods around the world. 

EEKE DE MILLIANO: Yeah, it’s like staying on top of the fashion trends. Like, what’s the latest, coolest payment method? 

GUILLAUME DE CANNART: Yeah, that’s true. I wonder for you, do you think there will be new big incomers like UPI and Pix that will happen in other countries before we get to something like stablecoins? 

EEKE DE MILLIANO: That’s a great question. Wero is actually one of the ones that I’m pretty interested and excited about, which is a new payment method in Europe. And the idea is for it to be Europe interoperable and for it to sort of make up for a lot of the sins, I think, of some of the past payment methods in Europe with better disputes, etc. So we’ll see how it goes though. 

GUILLAUME DE CANNART: Yeah.

EEKE DE MILLIANO: The adoption thing is real. Like, how do you overcome, like you said, sort of those local preferences? 

ROHIT MISHRA: Yeah, and you had a great slide on the adoption of Pix. I firsthand saw, you know, India’s cash-based economy. Credit card penetration was like some single digits. And that, and UPI just completely came and transformed. And like every time I go back, I’m like, I feel like I have a refreshed shock experience of how prevalent it is. And so I think even just demographic preferences are changing, and people want mobile-first payment methods. And so I think we should expect that the likes of Pix and UPI will be recreated everywhere else also. 

EEKE DE MILLIANO: And do you think governments are a key player in that because Pix and UPI were both, kind of, government? 

ROHIT MISHRA: It’s such an interesting—because can you—like obviously in the states, things have gone a different direction. But I do think we should be, especially with the political climate that we are in, and as you were referencing to, we should expect a lot of governments trying to own a lot of their own rails. And so I think, again, back to my experience in India, there’s a pretty definite concern about, we have great allies in the US, but what happens if something goes wrong and we get cut off from the Visa and Mastercard networks? And so India has its own, France has its own. But I think as we get into real-time payments, I think there will be a sense of owning the system and then obviously trying to make it interoperable for the benefit of users. 

EEKE DE MILLIANO: Yeah, indeed. OK, so let’s get really practical. What real-time payment methods do you accept, and how did you choose? 

GUILLAUME DE CANNART: So we mostly prioritize based on where we have the most volume and where we really see a need. So it’s both like what you showed on screen, the really low credit card adoption rates—which are staggeringly low in some countries—which we had to look into and make sure that we were properly aligned with that, so places like Indonesia, India, Brazil, Korea. And also just where digital payments are also most popular, like real-time payments. So it’s kind of a coinciding of both of those. Again, we saw these really insane trends where, year over year, it’s just growing exponentially. And so we realized that we need to also stay ahead of the curve and offer the best possible experience to users. 

ROHIT MISHRA: Has there been any that has surprised you with usage or adoption? 

GUILLAUME DE CANNART: A recent one was Nigeria, where we added local payments there. Again, not a huge market for us, but important for us to enable access there. And we initially just had credit card payments. We switched to local payment methods, and 94% of purchases went away from credit cards to these local payment options and also increased purchases there. So you can really see that it’s increasing volume, but also giving a broader access to our products because not everyone owns a credit card. 

EEKE DE MILLIANO: OK. We obviously talk about stablecoins a lot at Stripe. You heard about it yesterday. You heard about it this morning. You heard about it right now. Do you think we’ve been stablecoin-pilled at Stripe? 

ROHIT MISHRA: That’s the question, right? [Laughter] There should definitely be a game of a number of stablecoin references at this conference. I think I’ve been working on global commerce for the last seven, eight years now, and stablecoins are this magical thing that we were—you know, I’m sure if people around the world in payments were like, “What magically could happen, what would we create?” 

EEKE DE MILLIANO: Well, it would be the unicorn of payments. 

ROHIT MISHRA: Yes, and look pretty similar to what’s now happening with stablecoins. And obviously, you know, with Stripe’s acquisition of Bridge, I think they’re becoming a lot more mainstream, and a lot more people will accept it. It’s a really interesting space, and obviously we are looking into how we can best leverage that for our audiences. But I think global payments will—this will be the next chapter for global payments and what stablecoins can enable, both on the pay-in side and then on the money movement side. 

EEKE DE MILLIANO: Fantastic. Well, I think that’s a great place to end. Rohit, Guillaume, thank you so much. Thank you for being fantastic partners. [Applause]