Stripe Sessions: 50+ announcements, including AI-powered payments, major upgrades to Connect, interoperability, and more

  • Stripe announces its largest ever set of new features, following a year in which the company processed over $1 trillion in payments.

  • New AI-powered payments features increase checkout conversion, boost authorization rates, and block fraud.

  • The biggest set of upgrades in Stripe Connect’s history make it easier than ever for platforms to embed financial services and grow their business.

  • Stripe becomes more interoperable, making it possible for businesses to adopt some of Stripe’s most widely used products while processing payments with other providers.

SAN FRANCISCO—Stripe, a financial infrastructure platform for businesses, today announced more than 50 new features at its annual user conference, Stripe Sessions, held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Last year, Stripe processed more than $1 trillion in payments for millions of users, from the fastest-growing startups to the largest enterprises. The features announced today focus on helping them accelerate their growth.

“Our mission is to grow the GDP of the internet. Our strategy is to listen carefully to the needs of the most sophisticated and innovative businesses in the world. This year, because of our scale, Stripe is well positioned to help our users deal with the increasingly complex payments landscape and put AI to work to drive growth. We’re also making Stripe more modular, so companies can use just the parts of Stripe most useful to them,” said Patrick Collison, Stripe cofounder and CEO.

Applying AI to the checkout page
Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite enables businesses like OpenAI, Slack, and River Island to build a high-performing checkout flow, using AI to determine which payment methods to show for any given customer. In the last few months, Stripe has doubled the number of payment methods supported by its Optimized Checkout Suite, from 50 to more than 100, including Amazon Pay, Revolut Pay, Swish, Twint, and Zip. As of today, businesses can also run no-code A/B tests for payment methods—an industry first, available only on Stripe.

A recent analysis found that businesses migrating to Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite saw an 11.9% increase in revenue on average, as more shoppers are converted into buyers.

Fighting fraud with AI
Online fraud continues to rise across the internet, up 11% in 2023 alone. Over the same period, businesses that use Stripe Radar for fraud prevention saw their dispute rates fall by 10%.

Today, Stripe launched new AI-powered features to combat fraud, including Radar Assistant. Businesses can use natural language prompts to describe new fraud rules they’d like to set, and the assistant will draft rules accordingly. The rules can then be tested against previous payments to see if they block fraud without increasing false positives, and boost revenue.

“I view Stripe as a data platform as much as a payments provider. Our fraud prevention is more accurate because of Stripe's data—and our customers check out faster because of Stripe's data,” said Dave Hayne, CTO of URBN, which operates a portfolio of global consumer brands including Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, Free People, and Nuuly.

Biggest ever upgrades to Stripe Connect
Stripe Connect is used by software platforms like Shopify to embed payments and financial services. This provides businesses running on Shopify with access to Stripe products like Payments and Treasury, directly from their Shopify account.

Today, Stripe announced its biggest ever upgrades to Connect, now with 17 embedded components, including 10 for payments. These embedded components make it easy for platforms to integrate fully functional financial services into their website. For example, with the Stripe Capital embedded component, platforms can drop a prebuilt UI into their site and immediately start offering loans to their eligible customers, all powered by Stripe.

With today’s upgrades to Connect, businesses can also now choose more precisely which capabilities they want to own and which to offload to Stripe—and change their choices as their business grows.

“Building our payments products with Stripe has meant a better user experience for our customers, lower churn, and higher adoption,” said Kady Srinivasan, CMO of Lightspeed, a commerce platform that uses Connect to enable businesses to sell online and in person.

Powering complicated revenue models
The internet enables businesses to earn revenue in more ways, but operating lots of different revenue models is hard. Stripe’s Revenue and Finance Automation suite, which includes Stripe Billing, Stripe Tax, Stripe Sigma, and more, helps users manage their revenue lifecycle. Over 300,000 companies use the suite, including Anthropic, Cloudflare, Atlassian, GitHub, Figma, and Duolingo.

Today, Stripe announced more than a dozen upgrades to its Revenue and Finance Automation suite, including full support for usage-based billing. Businesses can now track their customers’ usage of products and services inside Stripe, and translate that into precise charges for those customers. For example, a generative AI company could charge its customers on a per-query basis, more closely mapping their incoming revenue to their compute costs.

Stripe also announced that Stripe Tax has expanded to 57 countries and will soon handle automatic registration and filing of tax returns in US tax jurisdictions.

“We count on Stripe for scaling our business so we can focus on innovating and serving our customers. For Claude Pro, we use Stripe Billing to manage subscriptions. For our API, we use Stripe Invoicing to make it easy to automate accounts receivable, collect payments, and reconcile transactions. This improves the experience for Anthropic and our customers alike,” said Daniela Amodei, cofounder and president of Anthropic.

Allowing Stripe products to be used with other payments providers
Historically, Stripe was an all-or-nothing proposition: businesses needed to process payments with Stripe in order to use most of Stripe's other products.

Today, Stripe announced that three of its most widely used products—its Optimized Checkout Suite, Stripe Billing, and Stripe Radar—will be available to companies processing payments with other providers. This is particularly relevant for large enterprises that were unable to take advantage of Stripe’s product suite without breaching other long-term contract commitments.

“Today, we’re extending our modularity to the very core of Stripe: payments processing. Going forward, helping our users manage the complexity of running multiple processors will be a major investment area for us,” said Will Gaybrick, Stripe president of product and business.

These launches are part of a broader initiative to make Stripe more interoperable, and to embrace a wider ecosystem of partners. Stripe also announced new ways for partners to extend Stripe’s capabilities, including:

  • More than doubling the number of apps in the Stripe App Marketplace, from 70 to 150, including new apps for Salesforce, Netsuite, and Adobe.
  • New integrations for Stripe Terminal hardware with Oracle OPERA, Teamwork Commerce, Erply, Mercaux, and Tulip.
  • A new partnership with American Express, which joins the roster of issuers that are part of Stripe’s Enhanced Issuer Network.

Read more about the full set of announcements on the Stripe blog.