WISAM HIRZALLA: Hi everybody, I'm Wisam and I'm here with the Revenue and Finance Automation product team to share our latest product updates across the suite. So in this morning's keynote, you heard updates across the three pillars of Stripe's product portfolio. First, payments. Payments is about optimizing the payments experience for every customer anywhere in the world. Second, embedded payments and finance. Embedded payments and finance is about helping extend your platform offering beyond core payments. Think of things like banking-as-a-service. And finally, my favorite, Revenue and Finance Automation, which helps you monetize in new ways and in more markets.

Now this session is about what's to come in the future for Revenue and Finance Automation.

Now, typically when we talk to you about our roadmap, it's in a small one-on-one setting. So believe it or not, this is actually the first time that we've done this with such a huge group, and I know that many of you had to choose between your roadmap session that you're attending. So thank you for attending the RFA session. But you know the caveats of a roadmap. It's possible that some of the things that we're talking about are going to change, but please take this as a best sneak peek that we have into the future.

So, for folks who don't know what the Revenue and Finance Automation Suite is, you can think of it as a set of products that helps you orchestrate the revenue lifecycle, all the way from sending an invoice, managing subscription billing, ensuring tax compliance, revenue reporting, and revenue recognition. 300,000 customers use the RFA Suite to manage and grow revenue. As you heard in the keynote this morning, we're on track to pass $500 million of annual recurring revenue this year, and it is a huge focus area for Stripe.

So ultimately what we're shipping is designed to solve the points of friction across the revenue lifecycle, starting with sending an invoice all the way to closing your books at the end of the month. What we want to do is to enable you to move at startup speed while building on enterprise grade infrastructure.

So how are we raising the bar to grow and speed up revenue processes? From the conversations that we have with our users, we hear three common asks. First, our users want billing systems that help them grow, and that billing system should be configurable. Second, our users consistently tell us that they want tax compliance that supports agility. What this means is that they want to go and launch into new sales channels, ship new business models, and go into new markets in an agile and quick way.

Finally, they want to close their books faster without manual processes and get actionable insights. So over the next 20 minutes, we're gonna share what to expect across these three areas this year and beyond. So let's start with how we help businesses grow faster with Stripe Billing. I'd like to turn it over to Shankar, the product lead for the Stripe Billing platform.

SHANKAR VELLAL: Thank you, Wisam. As you operationalize your business, there are two things that stand out. The first is that there are so many small things that you have to take care of. Imagine you have a simple business model, perhaps a monthly subscription plan. You'll then want to add annual subscription options, and then you'll want to allow your customers to switch from the monthly plan to the annual plan at any time, even the middle of a billing cycle. And that means you have to support prorating changes. And then your marketing team might want to offer discounts, but only for annual subscribers. And then you might want to offer a free trial period, but someone might come and tell you that for customers in certain countries, you have to send a reminder email a few days before the trial ends. As you can see, even for seemingly the simplest business propositions there are so many things that you have to take care of. And don't even get me started on complex sales contracts, I can run out of time.

The second thing that stands out is that as your business grows, it's inevitable that you'll want to customize your billing system to meet the needs of your specific business. For example, you'll want to customize how invoices are endured and presented to your customers, or when to grant and revoke feature access, or what specific operational workflow to follow when a high value invoice goes overdue, or what steps to take when subscription payments fail. And I can keep going on and on.

We hear these stories a lot in our conversations with you. Businesses often choose a billing system based on their current set of needs. And you know, we've all been there, we understand. So many things to do, you're just happy to at least have a system that does what you want today. But 40% of businesses have lost deals because of inflexible billing systems and this percentage is higher for larger businesses. That's why as we build Stripe Billing, these are the same two things that we obsess about. First, we focus on providing more capabilities for you out of the box, so you don't have to worry about so many small things. And second, we focus on making Stripe Billing not only fully configurable, but easy to do so. So we'll talk about both of these things.

First, let's talk about what new capabilities we have out of the box. 83% of you said that offering the right pricing model is one of the most important factors that affects your top-line growth. It's reasonable. You want a billing system that will support you as you launch new products or new pricing strategies or expand to new geographies. Today, we announced new capabilities for usage-based billing, which has become a popular business model over the past couple of years. Quick show of hands in this room, how many of you work in a business that already does usage-based billing? Quite a few. You might've heard in the keynote already, but 80% of SaaS companies either already have usage-based billing or are actively considering [it]. With Stripe Billing, you can now use the concept of meters to stream usage events directly to Stripe, and you can rely on Stripe to do the heavy lifting of usage aggregation, rating, and reporting.

In addition, how you report usage is now fully decoupled from how that usage is priced, which means without needing to change your usage reporting mechanisms, you can more easily experiment with new packaging and pricing models. And crucially, all of this usage aggregation and reporting happens in near real time. You can use these capabilities today. But that's not all. We have a few more capabilities we're providing to you out of the box. These are just a few examples.

Prebilling will enable you to charge for your customers in advance of starting a subscription, or bill for multiple future subscription cycles right now. Another example is entitlements, which will make it easy for you to keep track of which customer has access to what features, even as you make changes to your packaging and pricing models. And later this year we'll also add support for popular pricing models such as credit burn downs. Once again, these are just a few examples of what we are doing to provide out of the box.

Now let's move to the second thing, which is making Stripe Billing fully configurable to meet your specific business needs, while being easy to do so.

As your business grows, you typically have workflows that get more complex, and we've heard from you many times that you're looking for more mechanisms to automate these billing tasks, ideally without having to write any code. With Stripe Billing, you can now create automations where you specify triggers, conditions, and actions. This effectively lets you create workflows of the type, “if this, then that.” For example, if a subscription payment above $1,000 fails, then you want a particular member in your team to be notified, and maybe a few days later for the subscription to be canceled. Or if you acquire a customer via your sales team identified by some customer metadata, then you want a specific invoice template to be used for all of their subsequent invoices automatically, and best of all, within the Stripe Dashboard.

This year we launched automations for your recovery and retention workflows, which makes it easy for you to reduce involuntary churn. And as I mentioned, best of all, you can do this within the Dashboard.

Now, once you've implemented these workflows, you can also view the effectiveness of all of these recovery strategies, also within the Stripe Dashboard. You can keep track of your payment failure rate, your recovery rate, what retry mechanisms are working better, and also track your top customers at risk. These features, along with our suite of revenue optimization tools, have enabled Stripe Billing users to recover 58% of failed payments last year. That translated to a revenue impact of $3.4 billion for these businesses.

You can use automations with Stripe Billing today, and we are continuously investing in a variety of triggers and actions so that you can model your operational workflow specific to your business directly within Stripe and have that be automated.

All right, but just having Stripe Billing being fully configurable isn't enough. After all, we know that billing systems don't live in a vacuum. It's also important for Stripe Billing to be easily integrated with the ecosystem of applications and other systems that we use. While there are many ways that Stripe Billing helps, there are two updates that our users are particularly excited about.

The first is that later this year, you can use Stripe Billing with any payment processor. Previously, if you wanted to use Stripe Billing, it was also best for you to use Stripe Payments. After all, Stripe Billing and Stripe Payments work seamlessly well together, but for a variety of reasons, many of our users want to more immediately switch their billing systems and not have to worry about payments. With this update later in the year, you can harness all the benefits of Stripe Billing without having to go through the technical costs of switching your payment processors also at the same time.

The second is that we're investing in more integrations into the ecosystem of applications that you use. For example, you can use the Salesforce CPQ Connector for Stripe Billing to seamlessly synchronize your sales contracts from Salesforce to Stripe and have them be built appropriately. Even if you use a more complex Salesforce setup, you can use our universal Salesforce Connector, for example, or you can use the more than 150 Stripe apps in the Stripe App Marketplace. For example, one of the apps will automatically take the invoices that you finalize on Stripe Billing and upload them to relevant government jurisdictions across the world as e-invoices. And I can keep going on.

To summarize all of this, I'll go back to the two things that I started with. Our focus is on giving you more capabilities out of the box and making Stripe Billing fully configurable to meet your specific business needs while being easy to do so. We do this so that you can focus on growing your business and as you grow your business, you also have to worry about what might surprisingly be a favorite topic among many of us, taxes. So for that, I'll invite Kathy to the stage.

KATHY PORTO CHANG: As your business grows, staying compliant with tax can be enormously challenging and expensive. Sales tax and indirect tax rates vary based on what you sell, where you sell it, and where your customer is located. They can change frequently and can differ even based on which city block your customer is located on. For example, look at all the tax rates that apply just right here on this rooftop accuracy at Moscone Center of San Francisco. And not only does your business need to calculate and collect tax, but the business also needs to register, file, and remit payments on time so that you avoid penalties and fines that can eat into your margin.

Compliance with tax isn't just a back-office thing to think about later. It can be a rate limiter on your growth. 81% of businesses on Stripe have told us that they expect to increase international sales over the next five years. I love working with Stripe businesses because y'all are so ambitious, but what you've told us is that thinking about tax compliance is a major reason why growth goes more slowly than you would like it to. And so we are investing to help you all expand into new markets without having to worry about tax.

Last year we expanded support across South America and Southeast Asia, and this year we're adding support for seven more countries across the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia. This means we cover virtually all of Stripe Payments. 96% of Stripe’s payment volume is now in countries that Stripe Tax supports, but we know we're not done yet, and so we have even more planned for later this year.

You've also told us that while calculating tax rates is the most burdensome part of tax, the operational cost really comes in registrations and filing, dealing with each individual tax jurisdiction country state. And so we want to solve this for you.

Later this year, you'll be able to have Stripe take care of this previously really time-consuming, mind-numbing task: doing end-to-end sales tax registration and filing on your behalf in select US states. You can stay focused on your business and let Stripe handle the complexity for you. For businesses outside of the US, we're making it easier to file VAT returns directly from the Stripe Dashboard with new apps from our global filing partners like SimplyVAT and Taxually.

For SaaS platforms in the audience, this next update is for you. You've told us that you've also heard this pain from your users who want you to make tax compliance easier for them. And not only can you offer features of tax compliance to your users, but you can build a new revenue stream for your business. Last year we launched Stripe Tax support for SaaS platforms, allowing platforms like Kajabi and Keap to offer easy tax compliance solutions to businesses that run on them.

And this year we're providing a new way to integrate tax features into your own platform’s dashboard with embedded components, starting with tax registrations and settings. Everything within this box, Stripe Tax will build for you so that you can put it directly into your platform experience without any up-front setup costs or any ongoing development maintenance. And you can also customize it to what you want to show users.

Finally, tax compliance isn't just limited to Stripe Payments. Many of you have revenue from multiple channels which makes it hard for you to, one, make sure you're calculating tax accurately and consistently across all of your payments, and also to aggregate all the information so that you can report on it and file accurately. And so we want to make it easy for you to centralize your tax data all in one place. This means that you'll be able to import data from different payment processors and platforms, access your data and aggregate them in Sigma and Data pipeline, and use connectors, no-code connectors, to make it easy to calculate tax across commerce platforms like WooCommerce and Adobe Commerce. This will improve your business's accuracy and data accessibility and make tax compliance easier across all of your payments, not just Stripe.

Now we've covered how we help you in billing and tax. Next I'd like to invite up Naz, our head of solutions architecture, to talk through revenue recognition and reporting.

NAZ IRANI: All right, I'm here to tell Shankar and Kathy that this is not enough. It is not enough for Stripe to offer billing solutions to help you adapt your business to the new pricing models. And it's not enough to give you tax to help you expand globally. You told us that changes to your revenue process [were] stretching and breaking your downstream finance systems. So we built Stripe Revenue Recognition to help you automate your revenue accounting and seamlessly account for even the most complex scenarios, like prorations, disputes, mid-cycle upgrades. But we want to do more. We want to do more to modernize your tools for accounting.

This year, we are adding advanced account mapping to make it simpler for you to map your chart of accounts to your downstream general ledger systems. This seemingly small change has already helped customers like Morningstar save hours of manual time that they used to spend mapping their revenue recognition reports to the downstream general ledger systems, making it faster for them to close their books at the end of the month on an ongoing basis. And now you can bring all of your revenue data together on Stripe Revenue Recognition, including your mobile app sales. Stripe Connectors for use with Apple App Store and Google Play Store are now available today.

Stripe data can be incredibly powerful, and many of you want to do more with your data. You want to dig in, you want to understand it, you want to see where to invest for growth. We're excited that you can now use the power of AI. Yes, the power of AI on your Stripe data. Today we announced that Stripe's Sigma Assistant is available for everyone. Sigma Assistant lets you query your Stripe data without the use of SQL in natural language. So essentially what we are doing is we are putting the power of AI in the hands of everyone in your organization, no matter their technical ability. So your operations team can now understand their churn trends and their dispute trends. Your finance teams can pinpoint the unpaid invoices. And your product teams can understand where their highest and top customers live, and their lifetime value. You can now do so much more with your Stripe data with AI-powered Sigma Assistant. Back to you, Wisam.

WISAM HIRZALLA: All right, thank you Naz. So, that was a ton of awesome announcements. So the thing that I want to leave you with is that everything that we build starts with you. Our roadmap is really all about listening to our users' needs. So, thank you for continuing to give us feedback. RFA's all about reducing friction, maximizing agility, and helping you grow revenue. So I'd like to go to Q&A now, and if I could invite the panel back to [the] stage while I get my trustee iPad out to see all the wonderful questions that came in. We are loading. All right, Naz, I have [the] first question that came [in]. I think you're probably the best person equipped to answer it.

NAZ IRANI: Awesome. Let's hear it.

WISAM HIRZALLA: “What are the integrations that you're planning for RFA products and other systems like ERPs and CRMs?”

NAZ IRANI: It is a favorite topic of mine. So we understand that Stripe Billing and Stripe RFA Suite needs to exist in an ecosystem around your revenue processes. So obviously the CRM, ERP, all of that is part of that. It's an important part of our strategy and we are investing a lot there. So today you would have heard that we announced our Salesforce Connector, NetSuite Connector. We also had the Apple App Store and Google Play Store that I spoke about earlier today. And there's also a lot of updates around our raw data through Sigma Assistant, for example. So across all of that, a lot of good work [has] already been done, but we're continuing to invest in that, and also I think Will spoke about earlier for those of you who attended the keynote, that it is an ecosystem and we believe in that. And we are working with a lot of partners there, as well. So yeah, that's kind [of] my answer there.

WISAM HIRZALLA: Thank you, Naz. Okay, I have two questions on pricing, which I'm gonna club together. So I have one question which is, “Could you provide more information around the proposed subscription pricing for Stripe Billing, and then, how does your pricing compare to existing solutions in the market?” So maybe I'll kick off and Shankar, you could add on as you see fit. So for folks who were in the prior session, we announced that we are going to be adding subscription pricing for both Stripe Billing and Stripe Tax. And that is going to be coming this summer. And the way that this is gonna be structured is that you will effectively pay for an entitlement, which will entitle you to a certain amount of, for example, payment volume in the case of Tax, in the case of Billing, you know, an entitlement perhaps of transactions for the case of Tax. And then if you exceed that fixed predictable entitlement, you'll pay some amount over that.

And you know, as typical in the market, right, we will have a price curve that's calibrated the right way between our pay-as-you-go pricing, which will continue to exist. We're not taking away pay-as-you-go pricing. And we're adding subscription pricing for our customers who prefer just a more predictable way to pay. In terms of, kind of, the value equation on pricing, you know, I think we like to match price with value. I think folks who have been with Stripe Billing for a long time know that we've been innovating on the product for many years, you know, shipped a ton of features today, right? And we're looking for a price point that's very competitive in the market and compares favorably to other third-party flares. And also, you know, building it in-house internally. I don't know, Shankar, if you have anything to add there?

SHANKAR VELLAL: Nope, you've covered it.

WISAM HIRZALLA: All right, rockin’. You get the next question then. “What are the largest risks with new businesses implementing Stripe Billing?” Two-parter, additionally, “how will the automations alter over time as the AI revolution continues?”

SHANKAR VELLAL: Okay, so the largest risks when it comes to implementing Stripe Billing. I think the biggest one based on what I've seen so far amongst quite a few large integrations to Stripe is how often we underestimate the benefits of thinking through the nuances of all the details end to end. People usually start off with, okay, high level, this makes sense. You know, one particular aspect, maybe the configuration of your product catalog makes sense, but you also have to think through how that works well across the other parts of the revenue life cycle. So how that integrates with invoices, how you want invoices to be rendered, how you want subscription updates to be handled, how you want prorations to be handled. And so I think the most important thing is to make sure you think of your use cases end to end.

I think not thinking through that, we've seen cases where users might get into an integration and then, oops, realize that they hadn't thought this through and in many cases Stripe Billing supports use cases, but users that are just not aware of it, so please go through our documentation, let us know where you see there are gaps. But I think thinking through those use cases is perhaps the most important thing.

With automations, it's a very interesting question. For us, we think of automations as ultimately enabling, basically modeling, all of your business workflows and not just within Stripe. It can even [be] workflows that happen outside of Stripe eventually. For example, a very high-value invoice goes over [a] deal… you might just want to send a Slack message to somebody. Or a payment fails and you want to send an intercom message to your customer, and so on and so forth. And I think with AI, there are so many other tools that are coming up to help you in your business workflows. And so I think there is a lot of opportunity to automate all of that and make sure it works seamlessly across your revenue life cycle.

NAZ IRANI: I think one thing I'd like to add to that, like with the migrations, maybe not a risk, but for existing, like for those launching new business models, obviously, you know, a different story. But for the ones migrating your existing subscriptions over to Stripe Billing, I think migrations ends up being a very complex task, as well. So I just want to state we, like at Stripe, we've launched our migration tooling as well. We've already migrated, what, $400 million worth of solutions with that. So yeah, very excited about that. So migrations comes to mind when risks with billing integrations, when you talk about that.

WISAM HIRZALLA: Awesome, okay, so now for our number one most upvoted question, drum roll, please. For you Kathy, “Is Tax separated from Payments like the way Billing is, and how does it compete with niche tax providers like Avalara?”

KATHY PORTO CHANG: So I think the beauty of our tax product is it can be both. For users who are on Stripe Payments and on integrations like Billing, Invoices, Payment Links, and Checkout, our integration time could be as easy as toggling something on the Dashboard and then Stripe Tax is on. So we save a ton of integration time. And also for users who have, actually even are not on Stripe Payments, they can use our Stripe Tax API, which is completely agnostic, to just send us what the product is, and the location, call our API and get a rate back. So that can be used on Stripe Payments or not on Stripe Payments. And as I mentioned earlier, now people can upload their tax information from other payment processors, or send it to us via connectors, as well. So we are payment-agnostic. Sorry, what's the second part?

WISAM HIRZALLA: How do we compete with niche tax solutions like Avalara? Which, I love that.

KATHY PORTO CHANG: What we try to do, so I mentioned the integration time is vastly faster. It could be from zero to two weeks compared to a long time. We have users who come back to us from Avalara or from other competitors and just say like, “It's not worth investing the developer time in that, [and] they just want to use Stripe Tax.” And we seek to have an opinionated stance that we help you figure out the best tax solution for your business versus your tax team [having] to spend a ton of time figuring out and customizing these heavy software solutions.

WISAM HIRZALLA: Awesome. Thank you, Kathy. Well, we are at time. Unfortunately, we did not get to all of your questions, but please come find us at the Revenue and Finance Automation demo desk. We'd be thrilled to chat with you about all the questions that you had and you can also see all the features live that we shipped today. Thank you.