JAY SHAH: All right, so back in 2015, which is actually when I started at Stripe, checking out online was a meaningfully different experience. So here’s what a standard checkout page looked like about 10 years ago. 

Just to set the stage, 84% of online purchases still happened on desktop, Apple Pay was not available for online transactions, and credit card autofills were still quite nascent. So by a show of hands, how many people back then, similar to myself, needed to memorize their 16-digit credit card number just to fill it out online? 

In the last 10 years, things have changed. This is what checkout looks like today on Stripe. And consumers, including everyone in this room, now expect an efficient online checkout. And we actually bail the moment we experience any friction. From our stats, we actually see 87% of consumers abandon checkout if it takes too long. This applies to all businesses. 

So whether you’re a B2B business like Zoom, or a B2C business like Urban Outfitters, your consumers require a frictionless experience. Because at the end of the day, every single one of your customers is an individual, like [every] one of us in the room, that value a fast and convenient checkout. And so that brings us to Link. 

So what is Link? Link is a wallet by Stripe that enables consumers to check out faster with their preferred payment method. With Link, your consumers can check out three times faster. And for businesses with high repeat consumer purchases, we actually see a conversion increase of 14%. 

So why did we build Link? The premise is quite simple. As Stripe started to grow, we started to see millions of consumers check out across multiple businesses that use Stripe. So for example, let’s say I take a ride on an Uber, I buy some wall art on Etsy, and then ultimately order my groceries on FreshDirect. Before Link, I would have to take my payment details and type them in every single time across Uber, Etsy, and FreshDirect. 

So we asked ourselves the question, you know, what could Link do here? So like, if we were to store individuals’ payments details at a global level, we thought, “Hey, that would be providing consumers some convenience. It must offer some benefit.” And oh man, did it. Link’s growth has been off the charts. It’s available now in over 100 countries, and in just a few years is the third most popular payment method across the entire Stripe network. 

And an interesting stat is that 99% of all businesses in the Link network actually share a consumer with another business in the Link network. So the secret to Link’s growth is actually the fact that it’s built on Stripe, a network that includes some of the world’s largest growing businesses, some of its fastest growing companies, and where 9 out of 10 US adults have actually checked [out]. 

So today, I wanted to walk you through three lessons we learned when we were building Link. The first is, and unsurprising to all of you, convenience actually drives conversion. The second is that integrating payment methods should actually be easy and simple. And finally, payments can be fast and cheap. And later in this talk, we’re going to have Austin, who’s the head of payments at Etsy, come share some of the lessons they’ve had actually building Link recently. 

All right, so let’s dive into convenience and conversion. So with Link, autofill is just part of the story. You get so much more. And just to name a few of the additional features that we built into Link, let me call out a couple. So Adaptive Acceptance is in Link, which uses machine learning to improve decline rates. You’ve got card account updater, which maintains up-to-date payment details. And then you’ve got Radar, which blocks transaction fraud and also promotes trusted consumers. 

And as you heard today in the keynote, the newest feature in Link is actually Klarna. And with Klarna on Link, we’ve taken one of the internet’s highest converting payment methods and actually made the checkout experience even better. So I’ll show you how it works today. Let’s hop into my Link app. You can see that I now have a “Pay later” option in checkout. I don’t have a Klarna account yet, but the setup is much simpler because in the background, Link actually fills in details like my email, phone number, billing address. And in seconds, I get my Klarna terms and payment schedule, all without having to leave Link. 

So now let’s say I come back. And the next time I see Link in my checkout, my Klarna details are already saved; I can pay later with Klarna in just one click. So we’re actually currently piloting Klarna on Link, and we plan to make it widely available this summer. You can scan this QR code if you’d like to get on the waitlist. It’s also available on the Stripe website. 

So we’ve made the checkout experience more convenient. But for Link to be valuable to everyone, we wanted to offer a seamless way for consumers to pay the way that they want. And just in the last few years, we’ve been seeing an explosion of payment methods. Actually, by 2028, we expect that 58% of ecommerce transactions will come from local payment methods. 

But when it comes to offering ways to pay, it’s pretty easy to say, like, “Yes, of course, I want to give my customer their preferred payment method,” but adding one to my checkout is pretty painful, right? Like, first you need to build the integration, which takes developer time. Then you need to be very thoughtful about the appearance and how it shows up, which takes designer, data science, and developer time. And then you need to operationalize the payment method. And that requires getting deep into the scheme knowledge, right? So it’s like, what are the settlement times? What’s the risk? What are the disputes? And all of those details can be quite complicated. And that’s just for one payment method. 

So now, let’s say you need to make those same set of decisions across all of the payment methods that you need to support. It gets very complex and costly very quickly. So imagine with Link that you could simplify payments processing by offering a single integration for any payment method available to any customer, and built, basically, bundled into one seamless integration. So that’s exactly our vision for Link. 

With Link, you get a simplified integration with a consistent user experience, and ultimately, with ideally no-code flexibility. So today, we have cards, we’ve got ACH, and we have Klarna. And where we’re going is we plan to include every way that your consumer may want to pay, from real-time payments like Pix, as well as emerging methods, that I’m sure you’ve all heard a lot about, like stablecoins. 

So, Link is compelling when we offer things like convenience that drives conversion and no-code ways to add more payment methods, but it becomes a no-brainer once we start delivering cost savings. So bank payments using ACH rails have been around since the 1970s, and businesses have loved the cost savings. However, businesses find that the UX is quite clunky and that things like the settlement time introduce risk that may make the cost savings not worth it. 

So you all have been asking us for years to build a better bank payments product, and we couldn’t do it right prior to Link. We’ve created Instant Bank Payments, which are a way to create ACH with the simplicity of cards. For consumers, we’ve got a streamlined experience for the checkout, and an added ability to reuse your saved bank payment. As well as for businesses, Instant Bank Payments are instant. They settle in two days like cards, and Stripe guarantees bank-initiated returns, and we’ve even priced it at a discount to cards. 

So today, we’re excited to announce that Etsy joins hundreds of thousands of businesses who take bank payments on Link. Businesses have saved over 50% in per-transaction payment processing costs with Instant Bank Payments, and Etsy’s seeing comparable savings. So let’s take a look at the Etsy experience. I’m shopping on one of Etsy’s most popular sellers, MoodandMantle, for some custom wall art. During the checkout flow, you can see that I have the option to pay with my bank account. 

And because I’ve already saved my bank details with Link, I can simply OTP in, I see my details, and make one click to ultimately complete the purchase. So you can see that the consumer experience here is much more streamlined as well as Etsy is able to save on processing costs. 

So today we have Austin, the head of payments at Etsy, here to talk about why bank payments are strategically important and to share a little bit more about how they’re lowering costs while driving conversion with Link. Welcome, Austin. 

AUSTIN TAYLOR: Thanks. How are you, Jay? 

JAY SHAH: Good to see you, Austin. 

AUSTIN TAYLOR: Great to be here. 

JAY SHAH: All right. So Austin, as the head of payments, and I think what a lot of folks are very interested in, can you tell us a little bit about Etsy’s experience over the last 10 years with your checkout experience? 

AUSTIN TAYLOR: Yeah, I can actually go back even further. And before I tell you about the checkout experience, how many people here have used Etsy to make purchases? A good amount, right? But not everyone has. So I’ll give you a bit about Etsy. 

We’re a global two-sided marketplace where we connect buyers with sellers who produce vintage, handmade, and craft goods all over the world. We support sellers in over 50 countries, and buyers in virtually every country across the globe. We were founded in 2005 with the idea and the mission that we still hold today of keeping commerce human, and we do that through human connections. So we connect a buyer to a seller to really help engage in commerce for our sellers. 

When we started, we were not focused on payments and back in 2005 the payments landscape was entirely different, so we were using PayPal. It was like the one-stop shop in town to be able to facilitate payments on a global scale, which was our ambition. A little over 10 years ago, in 2012–2013, we really started to focus on how checkout builds trust through that commerce experience, and we realized that building our own version of checkout and our own fully integrated payments platform can really help and enable us to better serve our buyers and sellers. 

So that launched in 2012–2013, and with it were basic payment methods: cards. I think our checkout looked very similar to the original one that you showed up on screen. And we added local payment methods in different markets as we expanded, some of the early ones in our European markets—iDEAL, Sofort, and others—and we’ve expanded since. And what we’ve really focused on is building a checkout experience that is really focused on the buying experience and leans into that connection with sellers. 

So our checkout experience today is very simple. It’s a one-step checkout process. And it really tries to address the buyer on their shopping journey and be that experience that builds trust at the final point of purchase when the buyer and seller make that connection. 

JAY SHAH: Got it. That makes sense. Definitely quite the journey. 

So Etsy’s a global business. You all have prioritized US bank payments. Tell me a little bit about that decision and what kind of motivated the decision to offer that to the US shopper. 

AUSTIN TAYLOR: It’s an interesting moment for us to offer US bank payments. You don’t see this payment method used in many large retailers in the US today. But that is starting to change. And when looking at evaluating new payment methods, we think about two factors in what payment methods to offer in different markets across the globe. 

One is access. So we want to make sure that at least 95% of our buyers can have a payment method available to them to check out. And the other is then preference. So what payment methods do people want to check out with? Bank payments don’t fall into either of those categories in the US. But what we detected were rising trends. Globally, instant payment methods, instant bank transfer protocols like Pix, like UPI, have been rising and achieved very large market share in those countries. 

We’ve also seen other verticals, nonretail verticals, really succeed with ACH payments: bill payments, utilities, things like that, and many other use cases. But the trends that we began to detect were Stripe and others offering ways to push past some of the traditional friction of bank transfer payments in the past. So getting past that convenience factor. I think you said earlier for Link, one of your pillars is around convenience. Right? 

We see trust and convenience as those two primary decision points for users when they decide which payment method to use. So the convenience factor has much changed. The ability to link your bank account—not Link the product, but link the bank account and authenticate with a bank, rather than entering in manually your bank account and routing details. Especially, US consumers have an aversion to doing that. So being able to authenticate and build trust with your bank is one important piece. 

And to support that, we have a lot of really interesting user research, both internally and from the industry, that when you go through the participants in the payments value chain, and you ask buyers, consumers of online checkout, who they trust most, what players they trust most, number one is their financial institution. So it’s their bank. It’s not the merchant, it’s not the payment method, it’s not anyone else who’s in that chain; it is the financial institution. 

And so there’s a lot of trust if we’re able to create that connection directly with the bank to help someone check out. So that’s one. And two, there is the cost factor as well. Bank transfer payments are much cheaper than most other payment methods, specifically card-based payments and wallet-based payments, because of just the economics of the payment method.

And when we think about how we want to engage with buyers on Etsy, we want to bring buyers back over and over again. We want them to feel like there is a reason for them to return and continue to shop with our sellers and not be pulled off into other destinations. 

And what we identified with a low-cost payment method such as bank transfers is because of the economics of it, because it is so much cheaper than other payment methods, that we can actually return value directly back to our buyers as a way to not only drive usage of bank transfer payments and help push the industry forward, but also use it as a way to drive repeat purchase behavior on the Etsy platform. 

JAY SHAH: Got it. That makes a lot of sense. And so to play that back to you, it kind of sounds like, hey, the industry has changed. You’re now seeing experiences where consumers can see their financial institutions in the checkout, which garners more trust, as well as given the cost savings, there’s an opportunity to kind of build a better link even with the consumer as well. 

AUSTIN TAYLOR: Absolutely, yeah. 

JAY SHAH: Okay, I wanted to dive in a little bit deeper into your choice in bank payments. So to what we kind of mentioned, hey, there’s the historical 1970s-released ACH traditional way to pay, which from a consumer perspective feels the same, but settlement time windows, etc. And then there’s Instant Bank Payments. Why did you all decide to start with Instant Bank Payments? 

AUSTIN TAYLOR: Yeah, I mean, this is the big barrier you have to get through to offer bank transfer payments, specifically in the US, and in many other markets as well, because an ACH transaction comes with a settlement delay, right? It’s not instantaneous, and it’s a single-step transaction. So unlike card card payments in which there’s two steps to a transaction—you hold the funds, and then you actually move the money and that guarantees us as a merchant that we’re going to get that money—an ACH is a single-step process and there’s delay in the money moving. 

The ACH system is very antiquated for those of you who haven’t worked in it. It shuts down on weekends. There’s a closing hour at night. So if you want to move money after, I think they’ve extended the window, but after 10:00 p.m. or 11:00 p.m. Eastern, you have to wait until the next day. So if you as a merchant are trying to pull funds from an account on the weekends or after closing time, there’s a risk that you’re actually not going to be able to get the money. It’s the settlement risk that’s innate with ACH. It wasn’t built for consumer payments out of the box when it was designed in the ’70s, like you said. 

So we knew that we had to address that problem, and the Instant Bank Payments product that Stripe has addresses that. So there’s that reduced settlement risk because the funds are guaranteed, and that is only possible because of the bank account linking that happens. So Stripe is able to look into the bank account, analyze data points, understand the risk of whether or not those funds will be successfully able to pull to us, and that mitigates the risk for Etsy that we’re able to actually collect those funds. 

So that’s super important that we’re able to mitigate our risk, and so that was one of the key points in the product that we looked at. The other piece is what we talked about a bit earlier, the bank linking process. So that reduces the burden, the manual-entry process that users hate of having to manually enter your bank account. I don’t know my bank account. I would have to go find an old checkbook somewhere that has my bank account details on it or log in to my bank portal to gather that banking information. And many other users feel the same way. 

So to be able to use what is a very natural pattern to log in to your banking account, to use that to pull the bank details, it’s more convenient. It hits on that convenience factor. It’s also aligned to that trust factor as well because users then see, “Hey, I’m actually talking to my bank. My bank is saying, ‘Yes, I will share the bank details with Link, with Etsy.’ I trust that process.” 

So that trust factor as well as that settlement risk, being able to manage that, were two of the main decision points on why use Instant Bank Transfers. 

JAY SHAH: Got it. And that makes a ton of sense. And this is one area we didn’t actually talk about in the talk before. Stripe has built its own bank linking service called Financial Connections, which actually Link leverages as part of the Instant Bank Payments process. So exactly to Austin’s point, we’re able to kind of build this direct set of integrations to banks. So like the Chase experience is going onto chase.com, where you can establish that trust with those consumers. 

AUSTIN TAYLOR: Yeah.

JAY SHAH: All right, now I’m going to ask you the question that everyone that first starts looking at this always asks us, and I’m curious how you all have thought about it, which is: in the US, do consumers really want to pay with banks? How do you promote more of that usage? 

AUSTIN TAYLOR: Yeah, I think the realistic answer and the tough answer is they don’t yet. And that is the challenge of adopting this payment method and being an early adopter and trying to push this. 

And we’re okay with that. We’re in this long. We want to make sure that we are partnering with somebody like Stripe, who are willing to work with us to build the experience to address those customer pain points, to understand how our users are feeding back into us so that we can build a payment method that is sustainable, that will become a meaningful share of wallet in the US. 

We do know that—like wallets, right, very popular in the US in many markets. When you look at the payment methods that sit behind the wallets, you have cards, which are very traditional. You have a lot of buy now, pay later now, credit-based payment methods. And then really anchoring that experience are top-ups from your bank account, so bank funding. 

So we do know that users are using bank transfer payments in a very popular way with a number of wallets. So we know there’s appetite, there’s interest. And then we see the adoption in other markets as well. And if you can get the product right, then users will adopt it. And so we’re making that bet now, and we’re doing it early because we want to help push that trend overall. 

There are some headwinds to that, right? We need to make sure that all of the stakeholders in the payment ecosystem are aligned. And right now, they’re not all aligned. Card-based payments are dominant in the US for many reasons. And we need to make sure that banking partners—that trust, the financial institution to users—are also on board with this, and the financial linking product that you have is helping to build that.

But the fact of the matter is that banks get a portion of the revenue from every card transaction. And that is something that we do have to work against. But I strongly believe that if we can work with banks to show them the value of that direct connection, and so that they can also be sharing information directly with merchants like Etsy and all of you out here, to have a closer relationship and a very prominent relationship in the payments process, that banks will see the value in being closer to payments and not hide behind a card brand, for example. 

JAY SHAH: Yeah. To pull on that thread, actually—and you’re kind of leaning nicely into an area that I’m very curious about, right? So we’ve got FedNow. We’ve got RTPs in the US. Like, tell me a little bit about how you think about the broader bank payments landscape in the US. 

AUSTIN TAYLOR: I think those initiatives are going to really supercharge this payment method, the general instant bank transfer payment method. Because, as I talked about before, there’s this natural settlement risk for ACH. Those are—RTP and FedNow—for those of you who don’t know, are real-time bank transfer networks that are being launched, in the process of rolling out in the US. 

They haven’t fully released their support for consumer-to-business payments. It’s a lot of business-to-business movements right now. High-dollar amount, institution-to-institution. But there is a vision of the future in which the settlement risk of ACH is no longer something that we have to worry about because funds move immediately. 

And when that happens, I think that the cost will go down overall—hopefully. As merchants, we certainly hope so. Because there’s not this risk that has to be taken on as part of the transaction. And it will allow for the quick movement of funds. That’s not the only way this can be solved. We’ve heard a lot about stablecoins today. I’m contractually obligated to mention stablecoins, by the way, when I’m here. But those real-time networks are really going to push the ability for us as merchants and providers like Stripe to quickly, instantaneously move money from a bank account to another bank account, and we can build around that to create a really great consumer experience. 

JAY SHAH: Yeah, I think we definitely see the same thing. And to what was mentioned in the product keynote before, I think we’ve been pretty excited to see the amount of bank account growth and usage growth. Right? So as was mentioned, we saw 3x growth just in the last year in terms of consumers finding different ways to pay with bank accounts on Link. And so it is very interesting to see how that frame is changing. 

All right, taking a step back on Etsy, Austin, I learned that you’re going to be celebrating Etsy’s 20th anniversary in June. First of all, congratulations. 

AUSTIN TAYLOR: Thank you. It’s a big milestone for us. We at one time were a very small company, a startup like many people who come to this conference, who Stripe builds amazing payments products for. And we’re 20 years old now, which is shocking. 

We still have the ethos of a small company. But it’s a big milestone for us because we are maturing as an organization. We keep that “keep commerce human” ethos to us. And as we look towards the future, what we’re thinking about is personalization. I think it’s been touched on in a lot of the keynote sessions so far on how tools like AI can really help with personalization, but that’s a huge focus for us as a marketplace as well. 

When you come to Etsy, you’re trying to find that perfect gift. You’re trying to find “special,” right? Like that’s what Etsy is for, is that special item. There’s not 50 versions of special. We believe that there’s one version of special for you as a shopper on that shopping journey, and our network of sellers are positioned to do that. So within the search and discovery process, we’re really focused on being able to connect buyers with sellers who are creating that special product just for them. 

And we’re thinking about that in the checkout process as well. Your optimized checkout product, I feel like, is a hit list of strategic imperatives for us on the payments team. We want to be very focused on customizing the checkout experience for individual users on their shopping journey, surfacing the right payment methods, prefilling information, tapping into networks like Link to be able to do that for us as well, because what that allows us to do is prefilled stored information that we don’t have to ask the user to put in for us. 

So we’re really excited to have that feature available for us in Instant Bank Payments and our Pay by Bank product. And we’re going to continue to push in that direction as we evolve our payments experience over time. 

JAY SHAH: So I just wanted to close here, just to kind of summarize some of the key outcomes that we talked about from a Link perspective. So first, conversion. And what we see is that convenience drives conversion. The second is very much so integrating payment methods should be easy and simple. And the third is that payments can, in fact, be fast and cheap. 

So regardless where the future of online commerce takes us—and I know we’ve heard a lot about this—but be it stablecoin payments or agentic commerce, Link is very committed to staying ahead of the curve, and really focusing on future-proofing our experience such that your checkouts can also be future-proofed as well. So, if you don’t have Link enabled, it is just a button click on the Dashboard. And thank you.