Sabra Meretab: Hello and welcome! I’m Sabra Meretab. Thanks so much for joining us for this look at global payments, a world that’s evolving and expanding so fast that it can be hard to follow. One thing’s for sure, though: Accepting global payments increases reach and revenue for businesses, so it’s important to keep up.

Today, over 70% of online businesses sell internationally, and between 2019 and 2021, cross-border payment volumes have at least doubled in every region Stripe operates. This means that even a small internet business operating out of, say, West Virginia, could benefit by supporting iDEAL, the most popular online payment method in the Netherlands. On average, businesses on Stripe in Austria, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland have increased their sales from EU customers by over 40% after accepting popular European payment methods like SOFORT, iDEAL, and Bancontact, which are outside of their domestic markets.

In doing so, they’ve also reduced their transaction costs by 40 basis points. That’s nearly half a percent more of their topline revenue that ends up in their bank accounts. At Stripe, we’re constantly looking to simplify global selling by offering buyers preferred payment methods. Because, no matter where you’re based, more payment methods can help you connect with customers around the world. And that can make a pretty big difference to your business.

There’s just one problem. Or, really, lots of problems. While this is a lucrative opportunity for any business, there are hundreds of payment methods around the world. Each of those payment methods can have specific onboarding requirements, unique integration shapes, and custom UIs that require you to undertake months of legal and engineering work. And more are coming online every day.

In fact, we’re seeing new payment methods emerge around the world at an unprecedented rate to meet diverse and, in many cases, culturally specific buyer preferences. To put it simply, the global payments landscape is more fragmented than ever before.

Even in North America, which has traditionally been card heavy, we’re seeing major shifts in buyer preferences. Specifically, buy now, pay later options are gaining popularity among US and Canadian consumers. In a recent study, nearly 60% of consumers in the US have paid for a purchase online using buy now, pay later. That’s a 50% increase from the previous year. Options like Affirm, Afterpay, and Klarna pay businesses in full up front, minus fees, while giving customers the flexibility to pay for a purchase over time. This helps customers afford larger purchases while staying within their budgets. And that can have a major impact for businesses. On average, businesses on Stripe that offer buy now, pay later methods have seen a 27% increase in sales.

But, the rising popularity of buy now, pay laters in North America is far from unique. Instead, we’re actually seeing an explosion of entirely new payment method shapes around the world. There are digital wallets, installment products, and in-person cash vouchers, just to name a few.

But, don’t just take my word for it. Take it from some of my Stripe friends. Let’s take a quick trip around the world and meet the people who are on the ground, building these global payment method experiences on Stripe. The ones that they themselves know and use as buyers.

First, let’s head to Europe. Over to you, Andrea!

Andrea van Scheltinga: Thanks, Sabra. Hi, everyone. I’m Andrea. Welcome to Amsterdam. As we would say in Dutch, “goeiemiddag.”

Buyer preferences are extremely market-specific. As Sabra mentioned earlier, here in the Netherlands, nearly 60% of online transactions are done on iDEAL, a payment method that allows you to make purchases with your Dutch banking credentials.

And iDEAL in the Netherlands isn’t an outlier. In fact, the rate of new payment methods rapidly gaining adoption with local buyers has accelerated across Europe in the last 10 years.

Many of these emerging payment methods are also mobile-based, making payments possible with just a few taps. BLIK, which started in 2015, now drives 60% of transactions in Poland. Mobile wallets like Vipps, MobilePay, and Swish dominate the Nordics, with millions of users across Norway, Denmark, and Sweden.

And that’s not all. The Open Banking regulation in Europe creates an environment that allows payment experiences that are even more transparent and fast. European businesses can initiate bank-based payments from customers who approve transactions simply using their mobile phones.

Last year, in the UK, payments using Open Banking grew over 550%. Soon, Stripe will be introducing our own payment method based on Open Banking, making it even easier for everyday consumers to go from scrolling and shopping on their phone to paying from their bank account in a matter of seconds.

And staying on your mobile device to complete a transaction with Pay by Bank brings higher conversion and lower fees than cards, which means more revenue for businesses. All of these new mobile payment methods have increased our expectations for payment experiences. We want them to be fast and frictionless. And our experiences as consumers are even resetting our expectations for B2B payments.

Bank transfers have been an important way for businesses to accept larger payments from other businesses for decades. But they’ve been riddled with challenges: Businesses have to manually review incoming payments into their company bank accounts and match them line by line with invoices and orders. This is really painful. In a recent survey, 59% of European small businesses said that reconciliation and accounting had been their biggest operational challenge in the last 12 months.

Why can’t these longstanding ways of paying be as slick and smooth as the newer payment methods we have in our personal lives? Well, on Stripe, they will be.

In June, we’ll be introducing Stripe’s own bank transfers for Euros and Pound Sterling. Stripe creates virtual bank accounts for each customer, allowing reconciliation to be automated. Managing excess funds from accidental overpayment and refunds will also be seamless—and that can make a huge difference for businesses.

Here’s an example. Spicers of Hythe, a UK-based provider for corporate gift hampers, will save their financial operations team 300 hours a year using Stripe’s bank transfers! That means fewer accounting headaches and time back to focus on growing their business!

Thanks so much for visiting! Let’s continue on your global payments journey and send you over to Valerie, who will let us know what’s happening in Asia. Take it away, Val!

Valerie Wagoner: Thanks, Andrea. Hello, everyone. I’m Valerie, and welcome to Singapore.

While there are clearly a lot of changes taking place in Europe, here in APAC the fragmentation and complexity is even more acute—in part due to the sheer scale of this region. Our digital economy is expected to be worth over $5 trillion by 2025, more than the rest of the world combined.

In most APAC countries, the dominant payment methods aren’t credit or debit cards, but rather a host of digital wallets and bank-based payment systems. You can even pay for online purchases at convenience stores! In Japan, nearly 40% of shoppers have paid for an online purchase at a local convenience store, known as Konbini, making it the second most common payment method for Japanese ecommerce.

And, just like in Europe, bank transfers are deeply entrenched in many parts of APAC. In Japan, they account for a whopping 96% of all B2B payments, while in Indonesia—the biggest economy in Southeast Asia—even B2C purchases are commonly paid for using bank transfers. That accounts for 50% of the payments volume there.

Indonesia also has over 40 licensed digital wallets, which continue to explode in popularity across the region. Alipay and WeChat Pay lead the way, expanding globally beyond their home market of China, unlocking in-person and online payments with a buyer base of more than a billion strong. Adding such locally relevant payment methods can have an immediate impact on conversion rates too.

So, it’s clear that the payments landscape here is diverse. But, there is one important trend that we’re seeing shared across APAC markets. That’s the growth of innovative “national” payments schemes.

Governments across Asia are spearheading efforts to digitize their economies. And that’s leading to a host of new payment method systems, like UPI in India, PayNow in Singapore, PromptPay in Thailand, and PayID in Australia, which are rapidly becoming the most common ways to pay in these countries.

These new systems involve deep infrastructure collaboration between governments and banks, allowing users to connect a bank account to a unique identifier, like a mobile number or national ID.

The result? Customers can pay a business directly without surfacing bank details. It provides better security and speed for buyers and lower costs for businesses.

Want to see more? Let’s take a quick trip to Thailand and see PromptPay in action.

Tee Chayakul: Sawasdee krab. My name is Tee, and here in Thailand, PromptPay has quickly become part of our daily vocabulary.

As Val showed you earlier, more than 70% of the population has used it since it was launched just five years ago. It’s expected to account for 43% of all payments in Thailand by 2025.

PromptPay is a QR code–based payment system. So when I choose to pay by PromptPay on the checkout screen of FlowAccount—currently one of our early beta users in Thailand—for a monthly subscription to their automated accounting solutions for SMBs, here I’m shown a QR code, which is dynamic, meaning that when I scan it with my mobile banking app, it automatically populates the payment amount and business ID.

Now, I need to only authorize the payment. And once I hit confirm, the payment is completed almost instantaneously, and I can go back to confirm this on the FlowAccount website.

Thailand has 21 participating banks that allow customers to do this very easily.

And there we go, that’s PromptPay! ขอบคุณครบั สำ หรบั เวลา [Thank you very much for your time.] And let’s head back to Val!

Valerie Wagoner: Thank you so much, Tee. That was great.

APAC countries are leading the charge in defining what the future of payments could look like worldwide. And, even without a common market like the EU, some of these new payment rails are talking to each other.

The Singapore regulator has already announced plans to connect PayNow directly with PromptPay and India’s UPI to facilitate cross-border transfers. You can expect to see a lot more innovation from APAC, and we’ll continue to make it easy for businesses around the world to connect with consumers and other businesses in the region.

Now, let’s continue our journey and visit Malu in Latin America. Thanks for watching!

Maria Luísa Cantadori: Thanks, Val! And hello, everyone. Welcome to Latin America! I’m Maria Luisa, but everybody calls me Malu! Thank you for joining me here in vibrant São Paulo.

Valerie talked about the government-led instant payment schemes that are exploding across Asian markets, from countries as small as Singapore to those as big as India. This isn’t just an APAC trend. It is global, and one market in Latin America is leading the change—Brazil.

Tee walked us through Thailand and PromptPay. Well here in Brazil, the Central Bank is building out PIX, a payment method that uses the same underlying concept. PIX is incredibly popular and easy.

As you can see, users pay by scanning a QR code or by copying and pasting a PIX code in their bank or digital wallet apps. More than 70% of the Brazilian adult population is using it, even though it was launched less than two years ago.

It has become a part of our everyday lives. You often hear us say, “faz um PIX!” which means, “Send a PIX.” It’s a catchy phrase, and clearly, Brazilians are acting on it! In fact, PIX has surpassed credit cards in the number of total transactions in Brazil.

In Q4 2021, almost four billion transactions were made using PIX. On average, that breaks down to every Brazilian making about 30 PIX transactions! On a per capita basis, PIX is growing faster than all of the other APAC government-led payment schemes. And there are interesting parallels between PIX and the European Open Banking system that Andrea mentioned.

Brazil’s Central Bank is following the Open Banking precedent, enabling buyers to authorize the transfer of funds directly to merchant accounts. That presents some pretty exciting opportunities. Rather than Brazilian buyers needing to copy and paste a PIX code, they’ll be able to complete the payment immediately on-session through a redirect.

Long term, that could unlock seamless subscriptions and one-click purchase experiences. PIX with Open Banking presents some exciting opportunities, but it’s not the only example of this payment method’s plans to pack in some powerful features.

In fact, PIX even has plans to enable transactions made in installments. While Sabra mentioned how buy now, pay laters are just gaining traction in North America, installments have been around for decades in Latin America, known as “meses sin intereses” in Mexico and “parcelamento” in Brazil. They make up 30% of all online transactions in both countries. But they’ve traditionally only been available with credit cards. PIX plans on changing that by including installments as a native feature of this payment method.

It’s almost as if Brazil is picking the best buyer experiences around the world and building them into PIX.

Mexico will follow soon, especially on the B2B side. They use the SPEI system for instant transfers, and the Central Bank is working on SPEI 2.0, which will have new features that will make it more similar to PIX and other instant payment methods.

All of these new and flexible buyer experiences will only continue to fuel the region’s rapid growth. Just last year, 13 million Brazilians made an online purchase for the first time, and online sales grew more than 26%. There’s one thing that’s clear: We’re seeing a digital transformation of innovative payments experiences around the world. In Latin America, Brazil epitomizes this.

And at Stripe, we are building the economic infrastructure that unlocks this for any business, no matter where they’re located. And how are we doing that? Let’s finish this journey where we started, and go back to Sabra to find out.

Thank you for joining me. Tchau tchau! E faz um PIX!

Sabra Meretab: Thanks, Malu! Welcome back!

So, you just heard a lot from Andrea in Europe, Val and Tee in Asia, and Malu in Latin America.

And, there’s one thing that’s clear: Global payments are growing and changing at a dizzying pace. And it’s not just important to keep up with it. It’s actually table stakes.

For businesses with global aspirations, missing out on offering the payment method that consumers want and need is leaving money on the table. And, unfortunately, many businesses do. Because even if you know you need to offer your global buyer’s preferred payment methods, it doesn’t mean it’s easy to do so at scale.

Just imagine needing to offer BLIK for Polish customers, PayNow for Singaporean consumers, or PIX for Brazilian buyers. It can take months of work to add just one of those payment options. Maintenance can be a nightmare of multiple bespoke integrations, settlement pipelines, entities, bank accounts, and currencies. If you’re trying to grow your business globally, it gets very difficult very quickly.

And we’ve seen many businesses fall into the trap of building laundry list checkouts. Packed, lengthy experiences of logos that customers have to parse through just to find one or two that feel familiar.

When the selection and ordering of payment methods displayed are not optimized to the buyer, it can actually hurt conversion.

That’s why we’re trying to make it super easy to offer a localized payment experience on Stripe, including helping you identify relevant payment methods.

With Stripe Checkout, Payment Element, Payment Links, and Invoicing, businesses can offer a localized payment experience for global buyers in minutes, not months. We recommend relevant payment methods based on your business’s transaction activity and what similar businesses on Stripe have enabled. You can turn those on right from the Dashboard.

For most merchants, there’s no additional onboarding or underwriting processes. And, for everyone, there’s no separate integrations, incremental technical troubleshooting, or ad hoc code required to manage and optimize new payment methods.

Instead, Stripe automatically surfaces the right fields to collect payment information for each method and dynamically displays relevant payment options to each buyer based on their device and location. That means you and your team will never need to build custom front-end payment logic to reach global customers and drive conversion. And while buyer preferences around the world continue to grow and change, your checkout experience is optimized to consistently delight customers.

So, here we are, around the world in under 30 minutes.

Thanks so much to Andrea, Val, Tee, and Malu for being a part of this global payments journey. And thanks to you for watching.