CLARA LIANG: My name is Clara Liang. I lead strategy and operations at Stripe. Today, the conversation we’re having is about invention and reinvention, and we’re really going to take a deep dive into two companies: Turo and the PGA of America. Now, you might be wondering why a car-sharing company and a professional golf association? What could they possibly have in common? What I can tell you is powering each of their businesses is a deep obsession with their end customer, and powering their innovation is the same underlying infrastructure for money movement. In just a few minutes, I’m going to invite Shaa and George from Turo and the PGA to join us on stage to share the stories of their journeys, and we’ll extract some learnings that you can take back to your businesses.

But before we jump in, let’s talk a bit about multiparty payments. What are they and what are the trends that are driving some of the innovation that we’re seeing in this space? Multiparty payments are basically everywhere, from grocery delivery to booking your vacation to ride-sharing. So, quick show of hands, how many of you took an Uber or a Lyft here this morning to Moscone? So about half of you. All of you, just like me, were part of a multiparty payment this morning. Like in a marketplace, like Lyft, you’re a rider, you’re paying Lyft, Lyft takes a cut, and they forward the money back onto the driver. Airbnb’s a very similar model. There are guests, a platform, and hosts. Besides marketplaces, we see platforms as a common example of multiparty payments. Think for example, Shopify. Shopify is a platform that creates tools for their merchants. A consumer buys something from a merchant and Shopify takes its cut for the platform.

Now, besides platform and marketplaces, which are the most common examples, we also see more examples across enterprises. Basically, any large company has a multiparty ecosystem, which means they then have a need for multiparty payments. When you think about it, enterprises have really been moving money across parties for centuries. It’s just usually not automated. We’ve all been there. There’s a spreadsheet, there’s some batch uploads, someone’s manually processing payments once a month or once a quarter, and, because it’s not automated, it’s hard to scale. But what we’re hearing more and more, in order to keep up with consumer expectations and in order to keep up with the pace of business, enterprises are starting to think about how they might disrupt themselves. In doing so, they can avoid being disrupted by challengers, and the approach they’re taking is to zoom all the way back, think about that end-to-end customer experience and reimagine the business models and the systems that they need underneath in order to be able to serve their users.

There are three common use cases that we’re actually seeing across Stripe that I’d love to talk a little bit more about today. The first is around supply chain. This is orchestrating payments, so think about consumers who are paying and you’re dealing with an intermediary, whether it’s a distributor or a dealer. This is really common in retail and automotive, for example. So, imagine you’re an automotive company. Your consumers want to buy directly from you. You’ve built a lot of loyalty with the brand.

Most consumers today shop online, and they love to find the car, and they really only walk into the dealership for the very last mile. It’s really only to pick up the car. So that’s what BMW partnered with Stripe to do. They allowed consumers in the US to find their car online, to actually pay for it online, they take a portion of the payments, route the rest of the money to their dealers, and in that case, the funds flow is actually not that dissimilar to what you see with Lyft, where there’s a rider, you pay the platform, and then the money goes to the driver. And what this enabled BMW to do was to go direct to their consumers without disintermediating their franchise partners.

A second use case that we see is in compliance. This is particularly common in really heavily regulated industries. So, think about insurance, banking, finance, and companies here are automating multiparty payments in order to segregate their funds flows and meet their compliance requirements. So, take for example, USAA. Due to some new requirements from the Federal Reserve, they actually used Stripe’s multiparty payments infrastructure to help split their bank and nonbank payment operations, and what that allowed them to do is move from manual to automated processes for their disputes and settlements, and that reduced the controls they had to worry about, and frankly, the risk of user error.

A third example to share is around unified commerce. So, all large companies today have many business units or most large companies have many business units, and historically, many of these have their own websites, and they have their own payments, and that results in multiple systems, and let’s be honest, fragmented reporting, and you’re piecemealing all these reports together. If you actually unify your payment operations, there are a couple benefits. The first thing is you can actually understand your user and their end-to-end journey, and how they work across all of your different properties a lot better, but even better, you can also innovate on their behalf. Think about something like a unified wallet that is now an experience you can provide them across all of your web properties.

That’s exactly what Wiley did. They took over 100 different web properties, and they unified them all into a single payments platform that powered all of their sites. And what that allowed them to do was reduce their cost of ownership. They were able to improve their operational efficiency, but most importantly, they were able to see their customer end to end and deliver a more consistent user experience across all 100 websites. So, if you’re interested in hearing more from what Wiley or USAA did, they’ll actually be here right in this room in the next session, so I encourage you to stay for that.

So, many examples of multiparty payments: platforms, marketplaces, many use cases within enterprises, even in traditional industries, all of them are streamlining money movement, all of them are an opportunity to both increase efficiency and reimagine and redefine the customer experience. So, next, we’re actually going to dive really deep into the marketplace model, and we’re going to look at two companies who are at very very different stages of their own journeys, and we’re going to talk about how they’re creating value for their users through their marketplaces. So, let’s please welcome up Shaa from Turo and George from the PGA of America.

SHAA ALAGUMUTHU: Thank you.

CLARA LIANG: All right, welcome. It’s great to have you guys here.

SHAA ALAGUMUTHU: Thank you.

CLARA LIANG: All right, I have a stack of questions, so let’s see what we can get through. Okay, so when I think about innovation or transformation, what really helps me is to start from the mission. What is it, what’s the purpose of your company, and what is it that you all wake up to do every day? So, maybe, Shaa, I’ll start with you. Tell us a bit about Turo and your mission.

SHAA ALAGUMUTHU: Yeah, for sure. Maybe we can start with a small video of a Turo. Wow, that reminds me of our trip to Hawaii last winter with my family, with two kids, where we went around in a Turo’s car around the island.

CLARA LIANG: It’s funny you mentioned that, actually. On our most recent trip to Hawaii, we also booked a Turo, and the thing that I really loved about that is when you, like, go on vacation, you get off the plane, and you’re just like really ready to be at the beach or check in and unwind. And we get off the plane, and our host had left our car in the short-term parking lot, just walked right up to the car like it was ours, like we lived there, dropped our bags in, and drove off. It was a great experience, so highly recommended it if you’re traveling.

SHAA ALAGUMUTHU: Glad to hear you liked it. Yes, here’s our mission: to put the world’s 1.5 billion cars to better use. Yeah, it’s a big number, 1.5 billion, but maybe I can talk a little more about what’s behind this number. What’s the purpose of Turo, why Turo even exists. When we want our guest to have a vehicle, we want to get the vehicle to them rather than they go to the vehicle with a few clicks in their app. So, when I say that... it’s not some vehicle or a similar vehicle that they want to get, rather it is the vehicle they asked for that they have to get, and that’s what we are striving for, and that’s one of our core purpose, and it could be for moments like a guest who is booking a SUV for their family vacation or for a guest who is booking a convertible for a trip with someone special, or a guest who is booking a vehicle to test-drive a car for, like, a week to know whether this is a good model that they can purchase.

So, there are different stories and even there is one—one story—which I can highlight. We have had a single parent, who had their vehicle broken, and it’s for repair for a month. They found the most affordable vehicle in Turo for a month, which is going to serve them, take their kids to the school or for them to commute. I think those are different kinds of values Turo is bringing into the community. And if I talk about our host side community, if someone wants to make money as a side hustle, we want Turo to be there. We have hosts who had used their vehicle for many days and rented out their vehicle for a couple of days to Turo to cover their monthly payments of vehicle. We all know the insurance cost is skyrocketed these days, the interest rate is high, and vehicle ownership costs is at its peak than ever before these days.

This supplemental income is definitely going to help anyone who is in need of it. And we also have hosts who run their family business in Turo, they have 5 to 10 vehicles, and they do this as a business, and we have even hosts who list hundreds of vehicles in our platform today, and they have cohost who is supporting them, they’re operating in multiple cities. So, that’s the range of hosts that we support, and the best part, I would say, of Turo is we connect these two communities, these amazing communities, and we create these human connections. When I talked about my last trip to Hawaii, I think the first person who I met when I landed in the city was my Turo host, and she warmly welcomed us, our family, and she gave even tips on how to go around the island, all the best places that we can visit. That’s the kind of trusted connection I feel our platform is creating. I think these are all different places, I personally find the drive to work in Turo. That all motivates me.

CLARA LIANG: I love that. So, maybe you can give all of us a sense of your community size. How many guests, and hosts, and cities are we talking about here?

SHAA ALAGUMUTHU: Oh, yes, it’s a pretty big community. If you look at our guests community, it’s close to 3.5 million active guests that exist in the platform today, and it’s growing fast, and they have drove 6 billion+ miles since the inception of Turo. If you want to talk about our amazing host community, the list is close to 350,000 vehicles in the platform today, and we are available in 12,000 cities across the globe, and I believe we have 1,500+ makes and models available in the platform, which I’m proud to say that nowhere in the world, in any marketplace, you can find and rent this wide selection of vehicles.

CLARA LIANG: So, three million guests, that’s a lot, but I’m also looking at that number, $3.5 billion in earnings, that’s a lot of money to get into the right hands and to make sure you get it right on time, so it’s a lot to think about. George, how about the PGA of America? Tell us a little bit about your organization.

GEORGE WHITAKER: Yeah, so if you’re thinking of the PGA, you’re probably immediately thinking of golf, and you might be surprised to know we’re not probably the golf organization you’re thinking of right now. If you’re thinking of the golf that you see on TV week in and week out, where about 100, 150 golfers are competing to earn millions of dollars, that is not the PGA of America, not at all. We are a 501(c)(6) not-for-profit organization founded in 1916, and while you do see us on TV from time to time with some of our biggest events, like the PGA Championship for the men, the KPMG Women’s Championship, the Senior PGA Championship, and the Ryder Cup—which is the biggest event in golf, where the Europeans and the Americans battle it out for pride—we’re actually more focused on a different purpose here, which is to grow the game of golf, and we do that in a very similar fashion to what we hear, heard from Shaa, which is through personal relationships with our 30,000 PGA professionals.

Now, if you’re thinking of a PGA professional, these are typically your green-grass pros that you’d see at your local golf course, and they are like the hosts that we heard in Shaa’s visit to Hawaii, are often the first people you see at the golf course that greet you and make you feel welcome and invited onto the course. So, we see these folks as the backbone of the industry, we see them as the ambassadors to the sport, at the grassroots level. So our major events like the Ryder Cup, the PGA Championship, those are our revenue generators. That’s what helps us fund our mission.

Today, we’re actually going to talk about one of our mission-based programs that helps us grow the game of golf, called PGA Jr. League. A PGA Jr. League is one of my favorite programs at the PGA of America. It’s a youth-based program and it’s an incredible on-ramp to the sport of golf itself. I’m terrible at telling the story, so we have a video to help you get excited about it, and then I’ll tell a few more details after that.

Speaker 4: PGA Jr. League takes golf to the next level.

Speaker 5: It’s really cool.

Speaker 6: It’s so much fun. Wearing that jersey makes me feel part of the team.

Speaker 7: PGA Jr. League has given me my best friends.

Speaker 8: I love playing golf with my friends.

Speaker 9: Having a PGA coach is amazing.

Speaker 10: PGA Jr. League has been a game changer, love it.

Speaker 11: Find your community.

Speaker 12: With PGA Jr. League.

Speaker 13: Join the team.

Speaker 14: Join the team.

Speaker 15: Join the team.

Speaker 16: Join the team.

Speaker 17: Join PGA Jr. League.

GEORGE WHITAKER: As you can see, PGA Jr. League is a great on-course experience, and if you’re not familiar with golf but you see some things in this video that do seem familiar, like a team-based sport, jerseys, names on the back of the jerseys, a lot of people working together, this is how we’ve made golf more approachable like other youth sports, so families who are new to it can get into it easily. And you also saw something in the video that’s really important, which is a PGA coach. Unlike other youth programs, where you may have an amateur coach, like me when I coach soccer and I’m terrible coach at soccer, we have trained professional coaches that are helping your kids get comfortable with the sport. And this is where our multisided marketplace kind of comes into the story.

PGA Jr. League operates at a national level with some of our tools, and we use the power of the PGA Championship, the Ryder Cup, the KPMG, the KitchenAid championships as well, to drive people to their local programs. For that to work successfully for the coaches and for the facilities that they represent, the coaches have to set their own fees. And I don’t know about you, but golf can actually be quite expensive in some facilities at some golf courses, some markets, and in some places, it’s actually pretty economical for you to do. So, we had to enable our coaches to set their own price that’s appropriate for their market, cover their cost, and more importantly, be a sustainable business model for them and for the facility.

Now, any time you see jerseys and hear about something on the national level, that means there’s probably some sort of jersey fulfillment and fee that you have to cover there. So, the PGA of America has its own cut as part of the transaction that the parents do when they register. So, we have a little piece, they have a bigger piece to make sure they cover their funds, and much like Turo, this is where we are a multisided marketplace and we deal with multiparty payments.

CLARA LIANG: What you were just saying there about many of us that grew up having our own parents trying to coach us in sports, I know exactly how much we wish we had a marketplace to find someone else to coach me instead. So I love that, and I love that you shared the value that you are both creating and your companies are creating for your users is rooted in the core mission, growing the game of golf, putting the world’s 1.5 billion cars to good use, but what I really heard from both of you is it’s not just about providing a great experience to your end users—you’re also creating an entrepreneurial opportunity where hosts are building businesses, where your coaches and the local access to golf is an opportunity to grow a business.

And, so I’m thinking a little bit about marketplaces, the challenge, and also the magic of building a marketplace, is when you get the supply and demand balance mix right, and it’s really hard to get it right, but when you do, it’s a bit of a flywheel. So, I’m curious, George, how do you think about supply and demand and the role it plays in growing the game of golf?

GEORGE WHITAKER: Yeah, we have a really interesting relationship with supply and demand, and if we look back, during COVID, we actually created a boom in golf. Since then, more people are trying to get out and play golf. In fact, I was just reading an article in the Wall Street Journal before this session, where it was talking about millennials taking over private golf communities, because there’s just such demand for folks to have a different lifestyle, to be outside, just kind of a lesson we all learned during COVID, and so this creates an interesting challenge for us. Finding time on a golf course for a youth program isn’t always a high priority for the local golf facility, and PGA golf professionals are really busy year-round because of the demand within the sport. So it’s really important for us to retain and recruit PGA coaches to Jr. League, otherwise families won’t have access to the Jr. League program and have an easy way to be introduced to the sport.

Take, for example, Cameron Milton. Cameron is a PGA professional in Polson, Montana. He runs the only Jr. League program in a 50-mile radius of his city. Fifty miles, right? That’s a long distance if he wasn’t there. What’s also unique about Cameron is his program average is about 20% higher for female golfers than the National League average that we have right now. And we see Jr. League is not only an on-ramp to the sport, it’s also a driver for growth, for diversity in the sport that, historically, is not very diverse. So losing a program like Cameron’s would be a big hit to our mission to grow the game and honestly to make the game look more like the United States, more like this room, and less like what a tradition looks like, our grandfather’s sport. So, this is really important for us.

Now, I have two daughters, I love them, I’ll do almost anything for them, but I don’t know that I would put 50 to 100 miles to introduce them to a brand new sport on my car and my Tesla, as much as I love that.

SHAA ALAGUMUTHU: Maybe you can take Turo.

GEORGE WHITAKER: Yeah.

CLARA LIANG: Yeah, and how far would you have to drive if Cameron were not coaching?

GEORGE WHITAKER: It would be 100 miles round trip for you to try out a sport.

CLARA LIANG: So, keeping Cameron on the platform is pretty important.

GEORGE WHITAKER: We got to take out all the friction we can for Cameron.

CLARA LIANG: Totally makes sense. Shaa, what about with Turo? How do you think about supply and demand?

SHAA ALAGUMUTHU: Yes, as George mentioned, the supply and demand equation is very unique and it’s very important to maintain, and if I take Turo’s case—Turo is a—though we see it as one big marketplace, it’s a marketplace on its own in every city. Each city has its own supply and demand, it’s not like a typical ecommerce, where you can ship the vehicles, so the local supply has to meet the demand, especially in cases like when there is a local concert or local events, which is going to just spike up the demand, and be hard to make sure the supply is there. Maybe I can talk about a story on how the post-pandemic turned on for Turo and how what really pushed us to manage this equation. I think in 2021, in spring, I can take you all back in timeline.

CLARA LIANG: It feels like ages ago.

SHAA ALAGUMUTHU: So, when people wanted to desperately go out, we all wanted to get some sunlight and take a car, go out with our loved ones to take a trip, and, at the same time, we have to be cautious with all the things going around, and that’s also the time that there was the big supply chain challenges and the chip shortages lead to this rental car shortage. You all can or some of you can remember the long lines in the rental car counters, where you’re not guaranteed with your car, even if you are ready to pay hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, for the rental cars. I think that’s when Turo really jumped in and we worked with our local host to really ramp up the supply, to make sure we are ready to meet the demand of our guests when they really wanted to get a car into the cities, where they really wanted to go and take a trip on.

And it’s also very interesting to see certain cities, I believe, if I am right, it’s New Orleans where we have stories where the local community are ready to jump in and list their vehicles, and pick a host to enable tourism back in their cities, because they don’t want the rental car shortage to become a barrier for enabling tourism, which is one of the main income stream for those cities. So, I’m so glad to see Turo is able to make the situation better. When without Turo, things could have been even more challenging in my view in those places. So, just to summarize, I think the supply and demand thing is very critical, and it’s very dynamic. Which has to be always kept an eye on and managed.

CLARA LIANG: Sounds like definitely keeping an eye on that balance and, in particular, where you have scarcity, whether it’s in Montana, or during the pandemic and you have a car shortage, making sure there’s no friction and you actually have a great user experience. Feels pretty important. Let’s switch gears a little bit. Let’s actually talk about some of the contexts inside your companies and your organizations that led to the multiparty payments transformations that you undertook. George, was it seven years ago now that you joined the PGA?

GEORGE WHITAKER: Yeah, about seven years ago, myself and our CTO came in to the organization to lead a digital transformation. And if you’ve ever done a digital transformation, they’re always fun; they’re always challenging. If you’ve never done one at a 100-year-old organization, it’s a whole different types of challenges that frankly I don’t think I was prepared for, but when we started, Jr. League was actually in a pretty good spot. It had a business team that was passionate about what it was doing, cared about its parents, and cared about the parents’ experience as well, and they had selected a third-party registration platform, kind of a best-in-breed one out there, you would know the name if you heard it, and it worked really well for that single transaction, for the parent to check out and see that there’s a coaching fee, there’s a PGA of America fee. If you want to switch to the slide, Clara. Yeah, perfect.

So that part worked really well. And when we came in, there were challenges they were facing. We were new to them, they didn’t know who we were, so they didn’t really—kinda—weren’t going to trust us to say, “Hey, let’s rip all this out and do something different,” so we had to lean a little bit with them and solve some of the problems. The first problem that we saw there was the coaches actually had to register two times. They had to register on the third-party platform, they also had to register with our finance team as a supplier. If you’re a 100-year-old organization or an enterprise of any sort, you know your finance team has this complex and sometimes painful experience to get people registered, to get payouts, right? It’s no fun, but it’s necessary for controls.

We also had, in between these two systems, between our accounting system and between our third-party registration system, the magic of Excel and human beings making everything work, and any time you come in as a transformation, you’re basically looking for Excel, right? Easy target, easy target, let’s get that one, let’s go after it. Now, it worked, but it had some side effects. One, it took enormous amounts of time for our Jr. League teams to set up the third-party registration platform. It took our finance team tons of time to marry the two systems together, because the PGA coaches aren’t just necessarily representing themselves. They may be representing their golf course, they may be an independent contractor, they may have an LLC, it’s quite complex sometimes. So, they may have registered as a supplier for the golf course, but they put it under George Whitaker, golf club in the registration platform.

So while when things worked really well, we were paying people out in about 30 days, sometimes it would be 90 days, and sometimes we’d just get angry complaints from our coaches that they never got paid, and that’s a terrible experience for them and has them lose confidence in the Jr. League program itself. So we did is, we leaned in with them on three fronts. First, when you’re working with a third-party provider, you’re really working with their roadmap, not working with your customer roadmap or what you need, they’re going to try to fit you and conform it in into what they see their platform needs to grow their revenue. So, we worked with them closely, we worked with the Jr. League team, and showed them that we cared about them, we cared about their customers, and we were going to fight and advocate for them with the other product teams to kind of come up with solutions to make this better.

The second thing we did is, we found some really easy SaaS solutions to smooth out the registration process for our coaches to become suppliers. It wasn’t perfect, but it was easier for them, and our finance staff was appreciative, as well. And in between those two systems where it was purely Excel, we layered in some ETL processes and some APIs, and tried to smooth out as much as we could, but we were really just putting Band-Aids on a problem. Along the way, however, what we were doing is we were showing a business team that stood up Jr. League really on its own, that there was a technology team that cared about them, cared about their customers, as well, and we slowly built trust with them to come up with some bigger ideas, and the same was true for our finance team, who definitely did not trust some new folks coming and saying, “Let’s do something different in finance landscape,” but eventually, what happened is with the finance team and with the Jr. League team, we had enough trust and we had enough great ideas, and we learned about Stripe Connect to say, “What would better really look like?” And that got everybody thinking about it, “What could this really mean for the program if we did something different.”

So, if we switch to the next slide here, we’ll see that we actually streamlined the process significantly and we set out to build a purpose-built registration platform for the PGA of America, and specifically for Jr. League.

Broadly speaking, we can call it MyPGA, like you see at the bottom of the screen there, and this let us cut out the entire finance team from the process. It simplified the onboarding process for our coaches to have a single onboarding, a single registration year in and year out. It also meant that payouts went from, we’ll call it the 30-day number there, just for simplicity, to 3 to 5 days. That meant our coaches were getting paid faster, and they were seeing the rewards and the effort of getting their program set up and getting people registered year in, year out. So, we’re quite happy with the solution, and Stripe Connect was central to that strategy for us.

CLARA LIANG: That definitely looks...

GEORGE WHITAKER: The Stripe folks in the front are clapping.

CLARA LIANG: Definitely looks a lot simpler, and thank you for the shout out for Stripe Connect. So, for those of you that aren’t familiar, Connect is Stripe’s platform that orchestrates multiparty payments and it allows you to do a number of things, including route fence flows like this. Our team will appreciate the shout out, and it’s kind of amazing as I’m reflecting on it, I spent a number of years at IBM, as well, the process of changing legacy systems, it’s not just the systems, it’s also the ways of working and the ways the humans are used to working. That’s no small feat, so congratulations on those changes. Shaa, in your case, though, other end of the spectrum, you’re not actually transforming legacy, you’re building new as Turo is growing. Tell us a little bit about your international expansion journey and how you thought about funds flows there.

SHAA ALAGUMUTHU: Yeah, definitely I think there’s a different kind of challenge that we have, the pain while growing the business. So, at some point, a couple of years ago, we learned from our business goals that we were launching in two new countries in next one year. In fact, I was a bit nervous, “Are we ready as a payments platform to launch into new countries?” Because I know There are a bunch of challenges that we were facing. I think the first and foremost is our platform is more integrated with different vendors when it comes to paying out our host, and it was kind of a little unstable when it comes, at times where we were not much reliable, when it comes to paying out on time. So, we were already spending a lot of time in maintaining that integration and on this platform to get paid out to our host on time because we don’t want our host to wait for days after the trip completion.

The second challenge we faced is our readiness on the compliance. Are we ready, as a business, to be compliant in operating in new international countries when we wanted to launch? Because there is a big list when it comes to compliance. What detail we wanted to collect from our host before giving money to them, and what we should be having in our records, and are we even having the local experts within the company to build the product around it. The third thing is about the cross-border payments. When you’re launching an international company, most people in this room know what does it mean to the cost associated with cross-border money movements, and how can we, as a company, can be, efficiently do this with the right value to our bottom line, how can we save money on the bottom line while doing this cross-border money movement?

And at last, we were a small team, we were a team of few engineers, handful of engineers, and some of us are here, great, smart engineers, but still, we are a small team, where we wanted to ensure we have to be on time in launching these new countries. We ought to be smart about how we do things. We know what we need to do, but we must be smart about doing things. So, with all these things in mind, I think we were able to make a decision that, let’s go with Stripe Connect as a product. I think with Connect, the first biggest benefit I would say is the KYC verification, which is Stripe’s onboarded verification system, which easily blended into our experience. When a host—when they are listing the first vehicle for the first week, when they onboard into our system, they just go through all the steps within our system, what we ask them to do, and then they land in KYC, which really blends into the Turo’s experience, where they complete all the details, set up their payout, and then proceed with the vehicle listing.

And the best part of KYC is we don’t need to really build anything in special, except having this integration—one-time integration done, and also, with Connect, we get this local acquiring benefit, which really worked out well. When it comes to the international market, we don’t need to pay this hefty cross-border transaction fee on each and every transaction, what we do for the trip bookings. And at last, the list of countries, what Stripe Connect as a product is supporting, is pretty much matching with the list what we wanted to launch in. So, we came out pretty well I would say after the integration was done. And now, we have launched in two new countries, France and Australia, and it turned out to be a good decision for us.

CLARA LIANG: I’m really glad to hear that, and I’m glad to hear that it was feasible. So, these are the five countries that you’re in today. Now, let’s be honest, at the end of the day, it’s all about results and outcomes. So, tell us a little bit about what it did for your business and how that experience was.

SHAA ALAGUMUTHU: That’s a very good question. So, if I look back, what are the results? I think the software development time, coming from an engineering background, I mean, I can see there’s a lot of people from an engineering background here. We know what is the cost in building a new solution and maintaining that solution when we wanted to launch in a country, especially for payments, which is in the critical part of your consumer’s flow. And just to call out about the availability your team had posted in yesterday’s keynote, the 99.999, so that’s one of the best part of what I would like of Stripe, so that’s the number on top of which we build our availability. Turo’s availability in a checkout is built on top of Stripe’s availability. So, that’s something we really appreciate when it comes to payments integration.

So, I think the software development cost has definitely went down from many months to weeks. I can confidently say now we, our integration platform is not having a country-specific payment handling. It’s a very simple one, generic handling, which can be scaled across countries as we wanted to launch. Finally, in connection to what George had mentioned about the reporting, I think the people who work in payments, they can very well know what is the complexity associated with reporting. So, we have to make sure the books are closed on time, each and every dollar that is moved has to be accounted closer to real time, and reconcile back. The payments’ reconciliation should be much more reliable than anything else. So I think we were able to standardize this whole accounting pipeline, working with the data integration and everything. So, we don’t need to really touch or modify any of this pipeline when we want to launch in new countries, which happen to be one of the best results.

CLARA LIANG: Thank you. Those are some really impressive results. George, what about for you? What were some of the results you saw, especially for your coaches and golfers?

GEORGE WHITAKER: Jr. League continues to grow year over year, but one of our key metrics that we measure success against at the PGA is the NPS score for our members, and in this case, the NPS score for our PGA coaches. So, after we launched the new platform, MyPGA with Stripe Connect, we saw a 13-point increase in NPS. Now, we probably can’t take all the credit for that, because the Jr. League team’s incredible, and they were probably solving other things, but let’s just say it was at least 12 of the points was associated to this particular project. The other thing that, we were able to expand the Jr. League program to more seasons, so we were able to grow the time of years that we were running programs. We added a 17u program and we also added something called PGA Family Golf, which meant that we weren’t just focusing on young golfers, but whole families and getting them on the golf course and having a relationship with the PGA coach.

The other thing that’s... I’m forgetting my notes here, the other thing that was a big outcome for us is that the finance team had no operational burden to do this, and that’s huge, right? We are nonprofit, there’s only 330 employees at the PGA of America, so every time we can cut out somebody’s clerical work in the association, that’s a huge win for us. Lastly, and the thing I’m most excited about at this point is it gave us the confidence to build something even grander than just the Jr. League program, which is something internally we call PGA Coach. So, if you go on PGA.com right now, you’ll see at the top there’s something that says, “Find a Coach.” So, our technology team was able to build on top of the Stripe Connect technology, the multiparty payments, and allow golfers at any age or stage to find a coach in the region at any time, and this is really cool when you see it happen during the PGA Championship, which is coming up in a couple weeks.

If you go on the leaderboard on PGA.com, you will see the top five people, and you’ll see your local coach sitting right there in the leaderboard, all powered by the same technology. So, great results for us that’s helping us grow the game of golf.

CLARA LIANG: I really love that, and I think taking one bet to start with Jr. League, that’s a big leap forward, and then to have seen so much success and built confidence internally that this is a repeatable pattern you can keep doing. It seems like the opportunity to keep expanding your business opportunities grow, and that’s really self-reinforcing, which I think is awesome. All right, so we promised the audience some takeaways and some synthesis, so maybe let’s leave them with some words of wisdom from your experiences going through these transformations. Shaa, maybe I’ll start with you on some of your learnings and takeaways.

SHAA ALAGUMUTHU: So, when it comes to takeaways, I would say the most important thing is clarify your focus area. I think you, as a business, know what is the purpose of your existence, and you know what is the core to your business, what do you want to focus on, which is going to give an edge to your business. And that’s what you should be spending most of your energy on. I think the rest is something you can—you should find the right strategic partner to translate all your challenges into opportunities. I think in our case, it’s actually Stripe with the KYC, the Connect, as a product, which really translated some of the challenges we had into an opportunity in our global growth.

And at last, align your decisions for your future business growth. I think in Turo, we are so fortunate to have leadership who is very clearly laid out our plan and is transparent about our goals and vision. Maybe you should ask your questions to your leadership around where the business is heading towards. What is important for the upcoming years? I think that insight is going to really help you strategize your local domain. How we want to position, how we want to plan things, how we want to implement the needed stuff, and be proactive for it.

CLARA LIANG: I love that. I love that you’re doubling down on your core competencies and what makes you special. Outsourcing everything else to partners that doesn’t differentiate Turo and doing that with a view to the future. Thank you for sharing. George, what about you, your words of wisdom?

GEORGE WHITAKER: Those are great. I mean, I agree wholeheartedly with every one of those. If you’re coming into a transformation situation, you got to start by building trust with your business teams. We had success with the Jr. League team, and this worked out pretty quickly, relatively speaking for how fast our organization moves, but we actually didn’t have success with all of our teams right away. In fact, there’s one project we’re launching right now, that has been in the works for the entire seven years, mostly because we didn’t get our business teams bought in on the strategy, bought in on the shared vision, as well, which is a key takeaway here, and that takes time. So, you got to bring your stakeholders along with you, get their fingerprints on it, and make sure they really trust you.

I’m a big fan of the Ted Lasso show, and I wish I would’ve seen this seven years ago, because he has this one takeaway, which is be curious and not judgmental, and that is a key thing when you’re coming into a 100-year organization, where people been there for 30 years, you’ve seen the way they’ve done this for a long period of time, and you really just have to listen to what they’re saying and understand that before you start offering up any ideas, as great as it might be, like Stripe Connect. And the last one, again, because I’m forgetting things today.

CLARA LIANG: Customer experience.

GEORGE WHITAKER: Sorry, yes, customer experience. Yeah, the last one is, it’s really to know when to take control of your customer experience, probably from your third-party SaaS solutions. SaaS is great, you layer it in there, you put it in the right spots, but you really have to know when it’s time to pivot away, and I, the way you do that is by focusing on the entire customer experience, not just your primary customers, but probably your secondary customers, like your suppliers, and your finance team and your internal stakeholders, as well. Focus on the entire customer experience, get the trust of your business teams, tell a story together, so that way you can go to your board or your executive leadership and say, “Hey, we’ve got an idea, we need some money, let’s get this done.”

CLARA LIANG: I love that. At Stripe, we have an operating principle, which is “Users first,” all of you, and I think focusing on that end-user experience is really powerful. So, thank you so much for sharing. I think those were excellent words of advice. As you can all see, marketplaces are incredibly powerful. They create a ton of economic opportunity for all the players, whether it’s coaches and golfers, whether it’s for your hosts and your guests, and this model isn’t new. If you think about the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, it was founded around 1455, so it’s a pretty timeless model, and it continues to work well, and in this modern internet era, it’s not just digitally native companies like Turo or Airbnb, who are able to build really large, powerful, successful marketplaces—we’re also increasingly seeing enterprises and more established organizations undertake this as well, whether it’s PGA of America, or in this case, Marriott, BMW, and others, so we’re really excited about the power of marketplaces.

These are two amazing organizations that are efficiently matching supply and demand, and it’s not just about the sport or the car, as you heard these stories earlier, it’s about providing incredible user experiences, and on the other side of the marketplace, the opportunity to help entrepreneurs build powerful businesses and to be able to do that on both sides is really incredible. So, of course, none of this is possible unless you have a partner that enables you with a robust and reliable platform. That’s something that Stripe is happy to help, support, and so we’d love to have conversations with any of you, if you’d like to investigate or ideate on some use cases within your organizations, as you think about opportunities to continue to grow in ways that are efficient, in ways that are compliant, especially in a world that’s increasingly complex, and to be able to help you scale globally. We appreciate you all joining today. Thank you.