ANNOUNCER: Please welcome Stripe cofounders, Patrick and John Collison.

PATRICK COLLISON: Good morning. This is, by far, our largest Sessions ever; more than twice as large as last year. (Audience applauding.) And that we can all come together like this as a testament both to the vibrancy of the internet economy today but also to the growth of the Stripe community. So we want to start out by simply saying thank you to all of you for working with us.

JOHN COLLISON: And thank you for joining us here at Moscone, braving the San Francisco cold. We’ve got a packed agenda for you over the next two days including breakout tracks for enterprises, platforms, and developers.

PATRICK COLLISON: So tomorrow morning, John’s going to be sharing his take on the future of payments. Can you summarize that in a sentence?

JOHN COLLISON: No.

PATRICK COLLISON: Okay, well. You’ll just have to come tomorrow. And then we’ve got fireside chats with Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and also very current NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang.

JOHN COLLISON: Then Pat will be holding a live Q&A here on this stage tomorrow morning.

PATRICK COLLISON: So you can submit and you can upvote questions in the Sessions app, so you can keep that in mind over the course of everything you hear today and tomorrow.

JOHN COLLISON: Please actually submit questions in the app because if we don’t have enough questions, Pat will just be free associating about things top-of-mind, and you really don’t want that, so we’ll get some good questions.

Seeing this many of you here today puts in stark relief how much things have changed. It wasn’t that long ago that we were talking to very different customers at a very different scale about very different problems. In fact, the last time we were here at Moscone was for WWDC in 2007 and we actually weren’t allowed into this room.

PATRICK COLLISON: We were 16, what did you expect?

JOHN COLLISON: No, no, it wasn’t that. It was the first WWDC after the iPhone was introduced and this room was full so we were kicked out to the overflow room. So if you’re watching this from the overflow room, please know it gets better.

PATRICK COLLISON: Hey, the point is we never expected to end up here and so we just continued where John left off. Two years after that, in 2009, we decided that we just heard too many of these stories about the struggles and the challenges for getting up and running with accepting online payments. But I very clearly remember [when] we were walking back from dinner and John turned to me and he said, “We should just build a prototype. It can’t be that hard.”

JOHN COLLISON: Joke’s on us, yeah. Here we are 15 years later. We were chatting recently and reflecting on how, when we set out, there were two things that were going to change in a big way that weren’t apparent at the time. Firstly, that the payments landscape was about to change enormously, and we’re going to talk more about this soon. But secondly, that the problem that businesses were facing wasn’t just about payments.

PATRICK COLLISON: So on our first website, we had this statement here. This is actually what it looked like. Don’t judge us. We had this statement: “We believe that enabling transactions on the web is a problem rooted in code, not finance, that the core of Stripe is about code.” So because Stripe involved new kinds of APIs, we heard a lot of sort of unexpected and interesting feature requests over the subsequent years. So in 2012, Lyft came to us, and they asked us about driver payouts. Then a couple of years later, Shopify came to us and they asked about building spending accounts and issuing corporate cards for their merchants. And then during the pandemic, United Healthcare came to us to talk about modernizing money movement across the healthcare sector. And many more instances like these.

JOHN COLLISON: These new use cases aren’t about payments in the traditional sense. The problem is broader. What businesses want, we realized, is software-defined financial services, a layer that knits together the existing financial ecosystem in such a way that money becomes programmable in real-time and with comprehensive global coverage where you have rich data to enable business insights and ML. So that’s what Stripe is building.

PATRICK COLLISON: So 2024 brings us to an important juncture. What we hear from all of you is there are three things that are especially top-of-mind at the moment. First, the growing complexity of the financial landscape. So both the payment method level where you have RTPs, and BNPLs and crypto at the partner level. And even at the governance level, our regulators are getting a lot more assertive. Even though this is a lot to deal with, it’s also a big opportunity. So here’s a chart of the number of internet users who possess an electronic payment method. And as you can see here, there’s been a real explosion over the past five years. 2019 was not that long ago. More than a billion new participants in the internet economy since just before the pandemic.

JOHN COLLISON: The second is AI. If you’ve driven on [Highway] 101 and seen the billboards, you’ve probably heard of it. It’s obviously a platform that will matter for the coming years. On AI, you’ll see how we’re using LLMs, transformers, and deep neural networks to optimize every part of Stripe in service of your business.

PATRICK COLLISON: We’ve actually been training our own proprietary foundation model on financial data.

JOHN COLLISON: Our secret foundation model that is not announced.

PATRICK COLLISON: We’ll share more in the future.

Okay, and then interoperability. So because of this growing ecosystem complexity we were just discussing, it’s pretty hard for businesses to commit to monolithic solutions. And Stripe has, traditionally, as you guys know, been a kind of all-or-nothing proposition. So we’re going to share some updates on that front very shortly.

JOHN COLLISON: Before we get into that, two things. Firstly, I want to address the elephant in the room. A lot of you have asked if the session is happening today on 4/24/24 because our longstanding test card 424242 actually expires this month. But no, it was just fortuitous.

Secondly, on a more serious note, we want to give you a quick sense [of] what the Stripe ecosystem and everyone building on Stripe looks like these days. So last year, businesses built on Stripe processed slightly more than a trillion dollars of transactions. A trillion dollars, hard to know what to think of that number. Maybe I’ll ask Larry Summers tomorrow to put it in perspective. But one way you can look at it is that it’s 1% of global GDP—a truly staggering amount and definitely not what we were imagining when we started out. And because of this there [are] a lot of optimizations that we can invest in that wouldn’t make sense for any one individual business to build, but we can learn from all of you and the enormous data set on Stripe and make improvements with that.

PATRICK COLLISON: On top of that, there are also data ecosystem benefits. So if you think about things like fraud detection or KYC screening [or] authorization rates, so many of the core functions in Stripe benefit from the aggregate scale of the Stripe network.

JOHN COLLISON: Stripe gets better because of all of you, and that’s a recurrent theme that you’re going to hear over the course of today.

PATRICK COLLISON: So, while Stripe is now one of the larger infrastructure companies in the world, one of the less understood parts of our strategy is we care equally about both ends of the continuum. So both the world’s most innovative new businesses and also the world’s most established businesses.

JOHN COLLISON: Among startups, we’re proud to be powering all of the leading AI companies, including OpenAI, Mistral, Perplexity, Anthropic, Hugging Face, [and] Monumental, who designed the statue downstairs. If you’re in the market for a quick, cheeky statue...

PATRICK COLLISON: Monumental will have you covered. Okay, and then at the other end of the continuum we’ve seen really substantial growth in our global enterprise segment over the last year. So last year, at Sessions we mentioned our expanding work with Amazon. They’ve been joined by a whole host of new use cases for the past year. And so, this year, we’ve been enabling in-aircraft transactions with Alaska Airlines, which is a pretty cool Tap to Pay on iPhone use case. There’s Best Buy, they’re selling prescription medical devices with Stripe. Hertz is using Stripe Terminal to upgrade the car rental experience. We’re working with Zara, River Island, Urban Outfitters, and many other global brands. And whatever the scale, your trust is the most important thing to us. And the context of our product... We know that many of you build your roadmaps around ours and so that’s why we’re excited to share all of the updates that’ll come over the course of this morning.

JOHN COLLISON: It’s also why we want to look back at what we announced at Sessions last year. At Stripe at least, you’re not allowed to construct your goals for the upcoming period without grading your goals for the previous period. So we should grade what we did and what we said at Sessions last year. So we showed our Optimized Checkout Suite, which is now live with over a hundred built-in optimizations. We told you we’d add one-click bank account payments to Link, and we did. We showed our Terminal S700 device, and that actually took a little longer than we wanted to get live. We’re going to grade that yellow, but it’s now live and we’re really happy with the reception that we’ve gotten from all of you. You can check it out downstairs if you want to see it.

PATRICK COLLISON: We previewed our Docs AI. That’s now live at docs.stripe.com. You’ll hear a lot more in a similar vein this morning. We told you we’d enable a whole host of new card network features. So overcapture, multicapture, incremental auth, extended auth… they’re all now live. We said we’d roll out our new revenue reporting product and we actually ended up delaying that launch a little bit because we decided we wanted to expand the feature session. So that’s going to come in an improved fashion later on this year.

JOHN COLLISON: We showed you Sigma Assistant, which lets you write SQL queries with natural language prompts. That’s now available for all of you. And lastly, we showed our embedded components strategy for Connect and we’re super excited about that. So, basically, everything that we showed last year [is] now up and running and a whole host of more improvements.

PATRICK COLLISON: Okay, so that’s last year. As you guys might know our mission is to increase the GDP of the internet, and our strategy is to look for common patterns across the Stripe ecosystem and to hunt for important new use cases even when they’re nascent and to listen to new needs among you guys, the most innovative new companies in the world. And so to give you a sense for how all this works in practice, we’d like to invite to the stage Will Gaybrick.

WILL GAYBRICK: All right. Thank you, guys. So hello. We’re going to cover a lot today, including a bunch of brand spanking new things that were just launched today, and we’re also going to give you a sneak preview of some things to come. But before we get to any of that, many of you have asked where we are in Stripe’s journey building out a comprehensive set of software-defined financial services. Well, Stripe launched back in 2010, after that fateful “how hard can it be” conversation helping companies initially just accept credit card payments in the US. So today we offer a ton of payment methods, surfaces, and advanced features, fraud prevention, in-person payments. We actually own a hardware manufacturing company for payments terminals and a whole lot more. And this is our Global Payment Suite. It’s all designed to increase your revenue, decrease your payments costs, and create truly excellent payments experiences.

In parallel, we built solutions for marketplaces and platforms. This started in 2012, when we launched Stripe Connect to orchestrate multiparty payouts. Connect’s functionality has steadily grown, and today you can build full-fledged financial services businesses on top of Stripe. Everything from embedded payments to card issuance, treasury management, and financing. So this is our Embedded Payments and Finance Suite.

And then in 2018, we launched Stripe Billing to support simple subscriptions. And today, by most measures Stripe is the largest billing software provider in the world. You can use Stripe to send invoices, calculate taxes, do revenue recognition and reconciliation, and a whole lot more. So this is our Revenue and Finance Automation Suite. It helps you evolve your business model with agility and efficiency. So global payments, embedded payments, and revenue and finance automation.

Let’s get started with global payments. There is a misperception of payments as a glacially moving landscape. But as you all know, and as Patrick and John just mentioned, it’s actually changing faster than it ever has before. Payment methods are proliferating, regulations are more fragmented, and exacting fraudsters are getting more sophisticated. They have LLMs now and your customers are more global. Now, for example, you can see here just how fast some of the newer payment methods are growing relative to established options. So what does all this change mean for you as business leaders? Well, broadly it means that you have new opportunities to drive growth by increasing conversion and lowering costs, and you’re navigating a great deal more complexity.

So, to help you, we’re doing two things. First, before the transaction, our Optimized Checkout Suite enables you to craft and hone your checkout experience with high velocity and leverage. And second, once the transaction has been submitted, our Advanced Payments Engine boosts your auth rates, reduces your fraud and costs. And across both, we’re bringing to bear Stripe’s massive scale to optimize your performance and putting AI to work for the whole payment stack. So let’s dive in. And to get us started, here’s Neetika, who leads payments engineering at Stripe.

NEETIKA BANSAL: Thanks, Will. We introduced the Optimized Checkout Suite at Sessions last year. It’s a set of prebuilt payment surfaces, plus the infrastructure behind them, and these surfaces are completely customizable and embeddable to match your brand. They include over a hundred optimizations—things like language localization, form validation, input masking, CVC hints, and all the things shown here that boost conversion. Our Optimized Checkout Suite is now used by the fastest-growing companies in the world like OpenAI; global enterprise retail brands like River Island; B2B leaders like Slack; and many, many more.

Since [the] last Sessions, we’ve made major upgrades. We’ve more than doubled the number of payment methods we support, from 50 to over 100. This now includes Amazon Pay, Revolut Pay, Zip, TWINT, and Swish. In fact, we’ve added more payment methods in the last 12 months than the last 12 years. And you can toggle on payment methods directly from your Stripe Dashboard.

Now that you have access to all of these payment methods, how do you decide which ones to present to each customer? It’s sort of like trying to choose a show to watch on a Friday night. You need that Netflix recommendation engine. Well, this is where AI comes into play. Our models, trained on millions of businesses and trillions in cumulative payments volume, present the right payment method to your customers at the right time to maximize your conversion. They take into account things like location, currency, device type, browser, transaction amount, [and] even subtle things like commerce patterns in your sector or past buying behavior of that customer. Stripe’s AI-based payment method presentment results in a 3% uptick in conversion and a 7% increase in average transaction value. So more users are buying and they’re buying more.

While our ML models will boost your revenue, no one knows your business like you do. So today we’re adding two key ways of giving you all more control. First, we’re introducing our payment method rules engine, which will allow you to orchestrate payment method presentment. We hear from you often that you want to implement rules, like only showing a given payment method for certain basket sizes. Well, now you can make that happen right here in your “Payment method settings” page without writing any code. Second, starting today you can build and run A/B tests of different payment method configurations directly from your Dashboard. This is actually a first in the industry. Nobody else offers A/B testing. And let me show you how it works.

So say I work at an outdoor retailer named Galtee. I’m going to set up an A/B test to see the impact of adding a new payment method to Galtee’s checkout. I wonder about the ROI of adding a new buy now, pay later payment method and if it even works with my customer base. So here we are in the “Payment method settings” page, and I can just hit this “Create an experiment” button. So for my control group, I’m going to use my current checkout setup, which has no BNPLs, and for my treatment group, I’m going to scroll down, toggle on “Klarna.” And as I mentioned earlier, I want to use our payment method rules engine to only trigger Klarna for transaction amounts of greater than $50. Now I can save this rule, and I can pick a treatment size for my experiment. I want to run this experiment for 20% of my traffic. And look, the very helpful LLM has already given our experiment a name, and I can just hit “Start experiment.” And that’s it. You have now an A/B test running in production in just a few seconds.

I’m going to fast forward a few weeks and show you what [the] results of an A/B test look like. So I’m just going to pick an experiment that I’ve already run. I can just hit “View report,” and there it is. With a 5.6% increase in conversion, adding Klarna to your checkout looks like a really good idea. You can note that all findings are statistically significant. So there you have it: a powerful A/B testing tool right in your Stripe Dashboard.

You tell us that your engineering resources are limited. So that’s what’s cool about this demo. You don’t have to make any frontend changes. You don’t have to make any server side changes. You don’t have to bother with complex payment method presentment logic. With the Optimized Checkout Suite, you can easily wield the power of over 100 payment methods. Back to you, Will.

WILL GAYBRICK: So there are a truckload of other updates we made to our Optimized Checkout Suite and one to highlight: Adaptive Pricing, which dynamically localizes your prices across 40 countries. Amazingly, our data shows that for every six international sales you make, you’ll probably get a seventh because of the conversion uplift from Adaptive Pricing. And with our Optimized Checkout Suite, you get Adaptive Pricing, everything Neetika showed you, and everything else that hundreds of Stripe engineers are building for you today, next quarter [and] the one after, and for years to come. In other words, the Optimized Checkout Suite will have a compounding impact on your revenue. And that’s what our data shows.

Last year, we shared that our Optimized Checkout Suite boosts revenue by about 10.5% based on a rigorous test across 10,000 Stripe users. Well, we’ve now made a ton of improvements, so we reran the numbers. And on average, businesses saw an 11.9% increase in revenue just from upgrading to Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite. So let me say that again. The Optimized Checkout Suite boosts your revenue by 11.9%. This is based on all of the improvements that we just spoke about and many more we didn’t have time to cover, but it goes beyond payment forms.

In fact, a couple years back, we asked ourselves, could we do away with payment forms entirely? Well, we realized that we couldn’t do this alone. To make this happen, you all need each other. The person to your left, the person to your right—take a moment, turn and shake their hands. I’m just kidding. Not that kind of conference. But Tony Robbins, we are thrilled to have you as a Stripe user.

So let’s take a second and talk about Link. The core premise behind Link is that you all could help each other streamline checkout and improve customer experience. With Link, users, your customers, save their payment information to Stripe when they’re checking out on an optimized checkout surface. Then when they come across another Link-enabled surface, they can check out with just one click. So you might create a Link account when you’re [buying] coffee from Blue Bottle and then use it seamlessly to pay for ChatGPT Plus.

But Link is about much more than just streamlining checkout. It is now creating novel payments experiences. Consider paying with your bank account in the US. You all have asked for this for years, but we couldn’t build it right before Link. Authenticating your bank account is simply too friction-full. You slog through all of those screens, bounce to your banking app, twiddle your thumbs through the latency of old bank mainframe infrastructure, and very often, you just abandon the flow. So this kills conversion and undermines the whole value proposition. Well with Link, your customers only have to save their bank account once and they can pay with it with just one tap on any optimized checkout surface.

At Sessions last year, Uber announced that they were starting to use Link for bank payments. A year [out], Uber is now saving over 50% in per-transaction costs when customers pay with their bank account using Link. They’ve rolled it out to all rides and deliveries in the US. In fact, we’d love for all of you to try it, so we’re giving everyone here $20 off on your Uber ride home if you pay with Link and use your bank account. You should have already got a notification in your Sessions app. So Link is probably our single most powerful lever to increase your revenue and decrease your payments costs. It’s accepted by hundreds of thousands of companies including Anthropic, MetLife, and for all those golf lovers out there, the PGA. If it’s not live in your Stripe integration today, you can turn it on from the Dashboard in just a couple of clicks.

Now, bringing all of this together, let’s hear directly from a Stripe user about upgrading their payments infrastructure. URBN is the parent company of retail brands including Urban Outfitters, Free People, Nuuly, and Anthropologie. Please welcome the CTO of URBN, Dave Hayne.

DAVE HAYNE: Good morning. Everything we do at URBN is grounded in our passion for creativity and our customer-first mindset. Our goal is to give our customers the products and experiences they want, no matter how, when, or where they shop with us. We were early adopters of ecommerce all the way back in the late ’90s because we saw how willing and even excited our customers were to engage with us online. Today, our digital channels are the main way we engage with customers, and ecommerce represents over 50% of our global revenue. Technology has evolved rapidly in the 25 years I’ve been at URBN, and our customers’ expectations have too. We must stay nimble to provide the best-in-class experience we’re known for. So that’s why URBN chose to build our ecommerce platforms from the ground up to have full control of the customer experience. That’s why we chose to launch a clothing-rental platform called Nuuly with all frontend and backend systems built in-house, and that’s why we’ve partnered with Stripe to power the payments experience across our brands in all North America stores and websites.

So now thanks to Link, our web and app customers have a frictionless way to pay with their bank account, which in turn lowers our payments costs. And Stripe Terminal, which is being deployed in all of our North American stores will create a unified experience across online and in-store transactions. Stripe is not just helping us with payments; we really view them as a data platform. Stripe’s data can help drive down fraud, and we’ve seen increased checkout speeds both in stores and online. Like our early embrace of ecommerce and the custom digital platforms we’ve built in-house, we know that a seamless payments experience is not only something our customers want, but it’s essential for our business. And with our Stripe partnership, we are very excited to innovate together well into the future. Thank you.

WILL GAYBRICK: Thank you, Dave. It’s so cool to see a customer-obsessed company like URBN bringing its brand to life directly on Terminal readers. And it’s not just URBN. Stripe Terminal is now being used by some of the world’s largest companies including Hertz, Alaska Airlines, as Patrick mentioned, and Shopify. And in fact, there are now over 600,000 Stripe readers accepting payments in the wild. Our newest reader, the S700, is now generally available in 23 countries. We’re shipping offline mode, a bunch of POS and PMS integrations, and everything else you can see here.

Okay, so far we focused on everything leading up to your customer initiating a transaction [by] clicking “Buy.” Once the payment has been submitted, the game is now maximizing authorization rates while minimizing fraud and costs. So let’s talk about Stripe’s Advanced Payments Engine. We work with some of the most sophisticated payments teams in the world, and a major reason that they choose Stripe is the power of our Advanced Payments Engine. It has a ton of functionality and coverage [for] things like support for major local debit networks around the world, network tokens across 46 countries, real-time card account updater, and a slew of advanced card features. But even more powerfully, we use AI to do a ton of dynamic tuning. Payments amenable to nearly infinite optimization. Every payment involves a ton of decisions: the gateway choice, network token or PAN, BIN level, ISO message formatting, cross gateway retries, dynamic MCC selection, and so on and so on.

We orchestrate all of this to give you industry-leading auth rates that we’re continuously improving using machine learning. Here you can see the increase in Stripe’s auth rates over the last few years. And we’re doing this in partnership with major financial institutions. Last year, we announced our Enhanced Issuer Network (EIN). We boost auth rates by sharing out-of-band data directly with issuers in real time during the transaction. We’re continuously improving our coverage, growing the network. And today I’m excited to announce that American Express has joined the EIN, bringing coverage to nearly 40% of Stripe’s US payments volume.

So American Express and Stripe are now working together to deliver higher authorization rates to all of you, thanks to the scale of Stripe’s network. And our leadership in payments performance is validated by industry analysts. Stripe continues to be rated best-in-class for enterprise merchant payments. The most recent Forrester Wave concluded just a few weeks ago. Stripe received more top scores than any other vendor evaluated, including in the category of payments performance optimizations. So there are a lot of reasons why Stripe is a strategic partner to many of the largest enterprises in the world but perhaps foremost among them is reliability. Over the past year, we’ve consistently maintained API success rates above 99.999%. That’s 26 seconds of downtime per month. So today, based on what we’re hearing from all of you, we can confidently say that Stripe is the most reliable payments provider anywhere on the internet.

But sometimes when someone clicks “Buy,” you don’t want that transaction to go through because it’s fraudulent, and that’s where Stripe Radar comes in. Here to tell us more about it is Tanya, Stripe’s head of product marketing.

TANYA KHAKBAZ: Stripe Radar detects and blocks fraud using machine learning that trains on data across millions of companies and across more than [a] trillion dollars processed on Stripe a year. Since the pandemic, we’ve seen a huge surge in online fraud, which is up 11% in the last year alone. But in that same time, Radar dispute rates dropped by 10%. So online fraud is up, but thanks to our advances in ML, your fraud is down. This continues a steep decrease in fraud rates on Stripe, going all the way back to 2017. In less than 100 milliseconds, Radar assesses more than 1,000 characteristics of a potential transaction in order to determine the likelihood that it’s fraudulent. As you can see here, Radar is getting better with each passing year. Today I’m excited to announce we’re expanding Radar coverage to noncard payments, starting with ACH and SEPA payments later this year. We’ve applied the same ML architectures that Radar uses for cards to new models for ACH and SEPA. These models have blocked 16% more SEPA fraud and 31% of ACH chargebacks.

Now, like a cheese pizza, Radar is great out of the box. But also like a cheese pizza, sometimes you want to customize. With Radar for Fraud Teams, you can customize Radar to perform how you need it for your business. To make this easier, today we’re launching two things. First, fraud insights, which makes it easier to know which rules to write based on live monitoring of fraud patterns for your specific business. And second, Radar Assistant powered by AI, which lets you use natural language prompts to write your Radar rules. You can kind [of] just tell it what to do. So that’s Radar continually adapting and improving.

Now we’ve given you a quick tour of how our Advanced Payments Engine delivers improved performance and continually adapts to changes in the payments landscape. But zooming out, something we’ve heard from you [about] is that, both before and after transactions are initiated, you want better observability of how your payments setup is performing, as well as clearer recommendations for how to further improve it. This is why we built the Payments Insights Hub. It’s coming later this year, and I’m going to give you a sneak peek.

The Payments Insights Hub gives you a comprehensive view of your payment setup with quantifiable suggestions for how to improve it. It might recommend changes to your payment method’s logic, or it’ll flag cost savings you could realize by passing L2 and L3 data. It’ll show you precisely where you have a conversion drop-off. For example, here’s 3DS in your conversion funnel, and you can see the Insights Hub is suggesting that taking a bit more risk by authenticating fewer payments will have a strongly positive ROI.

Now I’m excited to share one more update for those of you with more sophisticated and scaled businesses. A lot of you run multiple Stripe accounts for your business covering different GOs or business lines. And real talk, it’s been challenging for you to have a single unified view across all of these entities. So today we’re announcing Organizations, which will let you bring your Stripe accounts together under one roof and make operating at scale much easier. It’s like a family reunion you actually want to go to. Love you, Uncle Charlie. Let’s take a look.

So here we are, back to that demo account that Neetika was showing you with our outdoor retailer, Galtee. This is the Stripe Dashboard for Galtee’s US operations. You can see here that Galtee has a lot of different international accounts. So I want to bring all of these different international accounts from Australia to Brazil, etc., together under one organization. I can do that right from the Dashboard. So I just create an organization. I will call it Galtee Inc. Select all my accounts, authorize, create, and that’s it. No code required. And in literally seconds, you’ve connected all your Stripe accounts into one organization. Now you can see an overview of the payments performance right here in the Dashboard. Because Organizations is integrated with Sigma, our host data warehouse, you can easily run queries across your whole organization to get insights about your business.

So say, for example, you’re wondering if that Black Friday promotion generated repeat customers. I’m going to use Sigma Assistant right here. What’s really cool about Sigma Assistant is that I can use natural language prompts without actually having to write SQL. So I’m going to write here how many customers from each account made a purchase on Black Friday 2023 and have made another purchase since then. Okay, great. So I hit “Run” here. It’s processing. It’s taking that natural language, and it’s generating the SQL. I didn’t have to ping an engineer for that. And it’s running across all seven of my accounts. And all right, I can see here the total. It’s about 80,000 repeat customers.

Xero and Atlassian are beta users. They’ve both told us that their reporting process takes less than a third of the time it used to. And there’s a lot more you can do with Organizations, like searching across accounts to centrally managing your team. You can request access today. Now, the point is, as you grow on Stripe, your operational overhead shouldn’t grow in tandem. You’ve asked us for better insight both on your individual payments experience and how your Stripe accounts are working and that’s what our Payments Insights Hub and Organizations are designed for. Back to you, Will.

WILL GAYBRICK: So there are a truckload of other updates we made to our Optimized Checkout Suite and one to highlight: Adaptive Pricing, which dynamically localizes your prices across 40 countries. Amazingly, our data shows that for every six international sales you make, you’ll probably get a seventh because of the conversion uplift from Adaptive Pricing. And with our Optimized Checkout Suite, you get Adaptive Pricing, everything Neetika showed you, and everything else that hundreds of Stripe engineers are building for you today, next quarter [and] the one after, and for years to come. In other words, the Optimized Checkout Suite will have a compounding impact on your revenue. And that’s what our data shows.

Last year, we shared that our Optimized Checkout Suite boosts revenue by about 10.5% based on a rigorous test across 10,000 Stripe users. Well, we’ve now made a ton of improvements, so we reran the numbers. And on average, businesses saw an 11.9% increase in revenue just from upgrading to Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite. So let me say that again. The Optimized Checkout Suite boosts your revenue by 11.9%. This is based on all of the improvements that we just spoke about and many more we didn’t have time to cover, but it goes beyond payment forms.

In fact, a couple years back, we asked ourselves, could we do away with payment forms entirely? Well, we realized that we couldn’t do this alone. To make this happen, you all need each other. The person to your left, the person to your right—take a moment, turn and shake their hands. I’m just kidding. Not that kind of conference. But Tony Robbins, we are thrilled to have you as a Stripe user.

So let’s take a second and talk about Link. The core premise behind Link is that you all could help each other streamline checkout and improve customer experience. With Link, users, your customers, save their payment information to Stripe when they’re checking out on an optimized checkout surface. Then when they come across another Link-enabled surface, they can check out with just one click. So you might create a Link account when you’re [buying] coffee from Blue Bottle and then use it seamlessly to pay for ChatGPT Plus.

But Link is about much more than just streamlining checkout. It is now creating novel payments experiences. Consider paying with your bank account in the US. You all have asked for this for years, but we couldn’t build it right before Link. Authenticating your bank account is simply too friction-full. You slog through all of those screens, bounce to your banking app, twiddle your thumbs through the latency of old bank mainframe infrastructure, and very often, you just abandon the flow. So this kills conversion and undermines the whole value proposition. Well with Link, your customers only have to save their bank account once and they can pay with it with just one tap on any optimized checkout surface.

At Sessions last year, Uber announced that they were starting to use Link for bank payments. A year [out], Uber is now saving over 50% in per-transaction costs when customers pay with their bank account using Link. They’ve rolled it out to all rides and deliveries in the US. In fact, we’d love for all of you to try it, so we’re giving everyone here $20 off on your Uber ride home if you pay with Link and use your bank account. You should have already got a notification in your Sessions app. So Link is probably our single most powerful lever to increase your revenue and decrease your payments costs. It’s accepted by hundreds of thousands of companies including Anthropic, MetLife, and for all those golf lovers out there, the PGA. If it’s not live in your Stripe integration today, you can turn it on from the Dashboard in just a couple of clicks.

Now, bringing all of this together, let’s hear directly from a Stripe user about upgrading their payments infrastructure. URBN is the parent company of retail brands including Urban Outfitters, Free People, Nuuly, and Anthropologie. Please welcome the CTO of URBN, Dave Hayne.

DAVE HAYNE: Good morning. Everything we do at URBN is grounded in our passion for creativity and our customer-first mindset. Our goal is to give our customers the products and experiences they want, no matter how, when, or where they shop with us. We were early adopters of ecommerce all the way back in the late ’90s because we saw how willing and even excited our customers were to engage with us online. Today, our digital channels are the main way we engage with customers, and ecommerce represents over 50% of our global revenue. Technology has evolved rapidly in the 25 years I’ve been at URBN, and our customers’ expectations have too. We must stay nimble to provide the best-in-class experience we’re known for. So that’s why URBN chose to build our ecommerce platforms from the ground up to have full control of the customer experience. That’s why we chose to launch a clothing-rental platform called Nuuly with all frontend and backend systems built in-house, and that’s why we’ve partnered with Stripe to power the payments experience across our brands in all North America stores and websites.

So now thanks to Link, our web and app customers have a frictionless way to pay with their bank account, which in turn lowers our payments costs. And Stripe Terminal, which is being deployed in all of our North American stores will create a unified experience across online and in-store transactions. Stripe is not just helping us with payments; we really view them as a data platform. Stripe’s data can help drive down fraud, and we’ve seen increased checkout speeds both in stores and online. Like our early embrace of ecommerce and the custom digital platforms we’ve built in-house, we know that a seamless payments experience is not only something our customers want, but it’s essential for our business. And with our Stripe partnership, we are very excited to innovate together well into the future. Thank you.

WILL GAYBRICK: Thank you, Dave. It’s so cool to see a customer-obsessed company like URBN bringing its brand to life directly on Terminal readers. And it’s not just URBN. Stripe Terminal is now being used by some of the world’s largest companies including Hertz, Alaska Airlines, as Patrick mentioned, and Shopify. And in fact, there are now over 600,000 Stripe readers accepting payments in the wild. Our newest reader, the S700, is now generally available in 23 countries. We’re shipping offline mode, a bunch of POS and PMS integrations, and everything else you can see here.

Okay, so far we focused on everything leading up to your customer initiating a transaction [by] clicking “Buy.” Once the payment has been submitted, the game is now maximizing authorization rates while minimizing fraud and costs. So let’s talk about Stripe’s Advanced Payments Engine. We work with some of the most sophisticated payments teams in the world, and a major reason that they choose Stripe is the power of our Advanced Payments Engine. It has a ton of functionality and coverage [for] things like support for major local debit networks around the world, network tokens across 46 countries, real-time card account updater, and a slew of advanced card features. But even more powerfully, we use AI to do a ton of dynamic tuning. Payments amenable to nearly infinite optimization. Every payment involves a ton of decisions: the gateway choice, network token or PAN, BIN level, ISO message formatting, cross gateway retries, dynamic MCC selection, and so on and so on.

We orchestrate all of this to give you industry-leading auth rates that we’re continuously improving using machine learning. Here you can see the increase in Stripe’s auth rates over the last few years. And we’re doing this in partnership with major financial institutions. Last year, we announced our Enhanced Issuer Network (EIN). We boost auth rates by sharing out-of-band data directly with issuers in real time during the transaction. We’re continuously improving our coverage, growing the network. And today I’m excited to announce that American Express has joined the EIN, bringing coverage to nearly 40% of Stripe’s US payments volume.

So American Express and Stripe are now working together to deliver higher authorization rates to all of you, thanks to the scale of Stripe’s network. And our leadership in payments performance is validated by industry analysts. Stripe continues to be rated best-in-class for enterprise merchant payments. The most recent Forrester Wave concluded just a few weeks ago. Stripe received more top scores than any other vendor evaluated, including in the category of payments performance optimizations. So there are a lot of reasons why Stripe is a strategic partner to many of the largest enterprises in the world but perhaps foremost among them is reliability. Over the past year, we’ve consistently maintained API success rates above 99.999%. That’s 26 seconds of downtime per month. So today, based on what we’re hearing from all of you, we can confidently say that Stripe is the most reliable payments provider anywhere on the internet.

But sometimes when someone clicks “Buy,” you don’t want that transaction to go through because it’s fraudulent, and that’s where Stripe Radar comes in. Here to tell us more about it is Tanya, Stripe’s head of product marketing.

TANYA KHAKBAZ: Stripe Radar detects and blocks fraud using machine learning that trains on data across millions of companies and across more than [a] trillion dollars processed on Stripe a year. Since the pandemic, we’ve seen a huge surge in online fraud, which is up 11% in the last year alone. But in that same time, Radar dispute rates dropped by 10%. So online fraud is up, but thanks to our advances in ML, your fraud is down. This continues a steep decrease in fraud rates on Stripe, going all the way back to 2017. In less than 100 milliseconds, Radar assesses more than 1,000 characteristics of a potential transaction in order to determine the likelihood that it’s fraudulent. As you can see here, Radar is getting better with each passing year. Today I’m excited to announce we’re expanding Radar coverage to noncard payments, starting with ACH and SEPA payments later this year. We’ve applied the same ML architectures that Radar uses for cards to new models for ACH and SEPA. These models have blocked 16% more SEPA fraud and 31% of ACH chargebacks.

Now, like a cheese pizza, Radar is great out of the box. But also like a cheese pizza, sometimes you want to customize. With Radar for Fraud Teams, you can customize Radar to perform how you need it for your business. To make this easier, today we’re launching two things. First, fraud insights, which makes it easier to know which rules to write based on live monitoring of fraud patterns for your specific business. And second, Radar Assistant powered by AI, which lets you use natural language prompts to write your Radar rules. You can kind [of] just tell it what to do. So that’s Radar continually adapting and improving.

Now we’ve given you a quick tour of how our Advanced Payments Engine delivers improved performance and continually adapts to changes in the payments landscape. But zooming out, something we’ve heard from you [about] is that, both before and after transactions are initiated, you want better observability of how your payments setup is performing, as well as clearer recommendations for how to further improve it. This is why we built the Payments Insights Hub. It’s coming later this year, and I’m going to give you a sneak peek.

The Payments Insights Hub gives you a comprehensive view of your payment setup with quantifiable suggestions for how to improve it. It might recommend changes to your payment method’s logic, or it’ll flag cost savings you could realize by passing L2 and L3 data. It’ll show you precisely where you have a conversion drop-off. For example, here’s 3DS in your conversion funnel, and you can see the Insights Hub is suggesting that taking a bit more risk by authenticating fewer payments will have a strongly positive ROI.

Now I’m excited to share one more update for those of you with more sophisticated and scaled businesses. A lot of you run multiple Stripe accounts for your business covering different GOs or business lines. And real talk, it’s been challenging for you to have a single unified view across all of these entities. So today we’re announcing Organizations, which will let you bring your Stripe accounts together under one roof and make operating at scale much easier. It’s like a family reunion you actually want to go to. Love you, Uncle Charlie. Let’s take a look.

So here we are, back to that demo account that Neetika was showing you with our outdoor retailer, Galtee. This is the Stripe Dashboard for Galtee’s US operations. You can see here that Galtee has a lot of different international accounts. So I want to bring all of these different international accounts from Australia to Brazil, etc., together under one organization. I can do that right from the Dashboard. So I just create an organization. I will call it Galtee Inc. Select all my accounts, authorize, create, and that’s it. No code required. And in literally seconds, you’ve connected all your Stripe accounts into one organization. Now you can see an overview of the payments performance right here in the Dashboard. Because Organizations is integrated with Sigma, our host data warehouse, you can easily run queries across your whole organization to get insights about your business.

So say, for example, you’re wondering if that Black Friday promotion generated repeat customers. I’m going to use Sigma Assistant right here. What’s really cool about Sigma Assistant is that I can use natural language prompts without actually having to write SQL. So I’m going to write here how many customers from each account made a purchase on Black Friday 2023 and have made another purchase since then. Okay, great. So I hit “Run” here. It’s processing. It’s taking that natural language, and it’s generating the SQL. I didn’t have to ping an engineer for that. And it’s running across all seven of my accounts. And all right, I can see here the total. It’s about 80,000 repeat customers.

Xero and Atlassian are beta users. They’ve both told us that their reporting process takes less than a third of the time it used to. And there’s a lot more you can do with Organizations, like searching across accounts to centrally managing your team. You can request access today. Now, the point is, as you grow on Stripe, your operational overhead shouldn’t grow in tandem. You’ve asked us for better insight both on your individual payments experience and how your Stripe accounts are working and that’s what our Payments Insights Hub and Organizations are designed for. Back to you, Will.

WILL GAYBRICK: Thank you, Tanya. Okay, so like Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour,” we’ve now covered a lot of ground. For the record, she’s my favorite Stripe user. Sorry, Tony, you are number two. Sorry guys, we’re trying with the jokes. We do payments, not comedy, but appreciate you bearing with us. So you all need tools to adapt to a fast-evolving payments landscape. Our Optimized Checkout Suite is the studio that allows you to iterate upon your checkout experience with incredible speed and leverage. You need comprehensive coverage of enterprise payments features and a decisioning engine to help you maximize authorization rates, minimize costs, and reduce fraud, and you get this with our Advanced Payments Engine. And across all of this, you need the latest in AI trained on Stripe’s gargantuan dataset to improve your payment stack at every turn. Now, we’ve upgraded our Global Payment suite far more than we were able to cover this morning, but we have so much more to share beyond payments. So for what’s new with Connect and embedded payments and finance, here’s Alex.

ALEX VOGENTHALER: So let’s see, about 35 minutes ago, John and Patrick broached the idea of software-defined financial services. Stripe Connect is the embodiment of that idea. It’s our software that enables you to run a payments business, not just collect payments and embed that payments business into your own products and platforms. Businesses across every sector of the economy have done this to great effect now. Gig marketplaces like DoorDash, commerce platforms like Wix, vertical software platforms like Squire for barbershops, Housecall Pro for plumbers, Xero for accountants, and so on, and even global enterprises like Zara and BMW.

Now, many of you in the audience—maybe most of you in the audience—don’t think of yourselves as platforms, but we’re seeing enterprises of all types use Connect to build business lines that expand their enterprise… everything from marketplaces to franchise management. In fact, there are now more than 13,000 platforms using Connect to serve more than 8 million businesses and solopreneurs. That’s orders of magnitude more than any other solution on the market. The business impact of embedding payments and financial services is simply stunning. Financial services are now the majority revenue line for industry leaders like Shopify and Lightspeed. So we don’t see these trends abating anytime soon.

And right now I’m going to share four major updates to Stripe Connect, and all of them will help you monetize financial services more successfully. Number one: a new ability to tailor Connect exactly to your business case. Two: components that help you attach and monetize better. Three: a new Merchant Risk and Compliance platform. And four: new tools that enable you to expand beyond payments to offer your users other financial services as well.

Let’s start with the first point: tailoring Connect. We originally developed Connect in a few specific flavors designed around your most common use cases as platforms. The bundles were preset, and you couldn’t mix and match. With Standard Connect, you got everything out of the box from Stripe. And at the other poll, with Custom Connect, you could customize anything, but it meant you had to customize everything. Well, as of this morning, we’ve flipped the last flags in production, and there is now just one flavor of Stripe Connect, and you can mix and match all those capabilities and change your choices as your business grows.

So now when you’re setting up Connect, you answer a few independent questions about what you want to build. Call it the BuzzFeed personality quiz of Connect platforms. Say you want to build a customized Dashboard for your SMB users but outsource merchant risk management to Stripe. You couldn’t actually do that yesterday. Now you can. Say you want to offer your enterprise users the full Stripe Dashboard but control your pricing and bring risk management in-house. You couldn’t do that yesterday either, and now you can. Based on the choices that you make in the setup flow, we’ll automatically choose the right attributes for your account’s API calls, and you can change those choices as your business evolves over time. Now, if you’ve already built a platform or marketplace on Connect A, you know what a big launch this is. This has been your top request for a long time now. And B, do not worry. Your integrations don’t break, and you also get the benefit of being able to evolve your Connect setup without starting over.

Our second set of updates help you attach and monetize your payments product more effectively. Before starting to optimize your take rate on payments and other business drivers, just getting your software users to adopt your integrated payments product needs to be job number one. The best solution to that is to have a great payments product so that users pull it from your hands. But that’s easier said than done. So we are packaging up our industry-leading payments capabilities—everything that you heard about from Will, Neetika, and Tanya as themeable, embeddable components for you to use in your applications. We introduced our first-ever Connect embedded component last year, and today we are expanding our lineup from 1 to 17. I’m going to show you a few examples in a fictional platform for yoga studios called Pose.

So here are the new payouts components which answer one of your users’ top questions: “When am I going to get paid?” And by the way, this lets you turn on Instant Payouts with zero engineering work, which is a whole new revenue stream for you. Here is the embedded payment methods settings, which unlocks rapid geographic expansion and domestic upsell opportunities for you. And one more, your users almost certainly need to calculate, collect, and remit sales tax. The new embedded tax component allows you to solve that problem for your users and monetize it. There are many others that we don’t have time to show, but they’re all live as of today. They work across all Connect configurations for all charge types, which was not true a year ago, and for all acquiring countries. That means you no longer have to spend years of development time to build a super high-quality payments product that your users are going to pull from you. In fact, MYOB, which is an accounting software platform, was able to use all of this to launch their integrated payments business in New Zealand in just eight weeks end to end.

So in addition to helping you with payments attach, we have two launches today that focus on optimizing your take rate on payments: a new margin report and pricing tool. Bharath is one of our engineering leads, and he’s going to help me demonstrate these right now.

Okay, so let’s say that Bharath is the CTO of that fictional yoga studio management platform we were looking at in those screenshots a minute ago, and they’re facing a competitive situation in the UK.

BHARATH SRIVATSAN: To ensure continued top-line growth, we feel pressure to reduce pricing. So with the new margin report I just downloaded from the Stripe Dashboard, I was able to throw a quick chart together and I can see what cutting our price might do to profitability. For example, it looks like I’m earning around 120 bps on domestic cards in the UK, which means I have some leeway to reduce prices.

ALEX VOGENTHALER: Now, normally, this would be the hard part calling in engineering and possibly Bharath’s payments provider to coordinate a pricing change, but...

BHARATH SRIVATSAN: But with Stripe’s new pricing tool, I can configure complex pricing logic right from the Stripe Dashboard. For example, let’s go ahead and reduce pricing on those UK domestic cards. Great. We’ll reduce it by around 20 bps. Great, go ahead, click “Save.” And that’s it, done.

ALEX VOGENTHALER: So both the new margin report and the pricing tool are available for beta sign-ups as of today. (Audience applauding.) So that’s payments attached and monetization.

Our third major investment over the past year has been extending our existing onboarding and KYC capabilities into being a full-featured Merchant Risk and Compliance platform for you. Now, in the wake of Silicon Valley Bank and FTX, global compliance regulations are becoming more challenging and boards are inspecting the details carefully. So your compliance program and merchant risk controls are more critical now than they’ve ever been.

BHARATH SRIVATSAN: Yeah, one of the biggest challenges we have at Pose is handling all the global nuances for those programs. We have to figure out what each region requires, constantly update our KYC flows as things change, and then validate all the information we’re getting in country-specific ways.

ALEX VOGENTHALER: So we’ve shipped a new embedded onboarding component that addresses exactly this.

BHARATH SRIVATSAN: So on the left here is the Pose registration page. As you can see, like my mind during Shavasana, it’s currently blank, but now... now I can literally drop in a prebuilt React component that builds into my frontend code. Now back on the Pose registration page, you can see that everything within this border is the embedded component for onboarding. That’s all built and maintained by Stripe even if it looks like Pose. My onboarding flow is also automatically localized to 46 acquiring countries and 45 languages. For example, we can see what it might look like for a user from Hong Kong. Great. Now as you can see, it’s perfectly localized. But maybe for Alex and my sake, let’s see it in English.

ALEX VOGENTHALER: One subtle but critical point here is that the language wasn’t the only thing to update. The onboarding component also localized the business logic under the hood. So for example, it knows the format of Hong Kong identity card numbers and how to validate those IDs. That’s logic that Bharath didn’t have to build and won’t have to maintain over time as compliance requirements change. And the same is true for every requirement in every market. Now, the other side of the Merchant Risk and Compliance platform, of course, is helping you not onboard bad actors to prevent abuse and financial losses. So we’re launching a new tool today that gives you superpowers in that fight versus fraudsters. It surfaces fraud signals to you based on activity from across Stripe’s network of platforms. We’ve long used that data for Stripe’s own internal risk management, and now we’re going to externalize it for you.

BHARATH SRIVATSAN: So back on the Stripe Dashboard, here’s my list of connected accounts. You can see that Stripe is flagging some of them as being potentially bad actors. Let’s click in on one of them to see why Stripe is worried about this particular user.

ALEX VOGENTHALER: The magic here is what’s going on behind the scenes. Stripe flagged this account because it’s using banker KYC information that was previously associated with suspicious activity elsewhere across the Stripe network. Pose would not have been able to catch this risk by looking at their own data.

BHARATH SRIVATSAN: And I can take action on these signals right here from the Dashboard. Let’s go ahead and request verification of a driver’s license. If the user doesn’t pass the check, I can have Stripe automatically pause payouts.

ALEX VOGENTHALER: So by using Stripe’s Merchant Risk and Compliance platform, Pose can be confident that bad actors will be filtered out, while good merchants can namaste. Sorry, when I became a dad, things like that, just like, they come out for some reason. So, Bharath, as a quick sidebar, could you scroll down to support cases? I think people are going to be really happy to see what’s there. We regularly hear that one of the hardest situations you have to deal with is when Stripe and your support teams need to come together to solve an issue for one of your users. So today we launched the ability in the Dashboard for you to see support cases that your merchants have with Stripe and communicate about those cases with Stripe to expedite things on behalf of your users.

Yeah. I think that was actually the very first-ever feature request that I heard about Stripe Connect when I joined Stripe. So far, we focused on growing a profitable payments business, but our ambitions and yours go far beyond payments. You want to build deep multiproduct relationships with your users by offering expense cards, financial accounts, loans, and so on.

So now let’s turn to embedded finance. Bharath, I know you carved out a spot on the Pose dashboard for Treasury, Issuing, and Capital. How quickly do you think you could get those frontend implementations done?

BHARATH SRIVATSAN: Let’s see.

ALEX VOGENTHALER: Okay, so it makes so much sense for a business like Pose to embed these other financial services. A yoga studio’s revenues are coming entirely through Pose. The studio tracks and schedules their employees there. So it’d be super convenient for studios to be able to issue expense cards to employees right there in Pose and have it draw that balance down into a downward dog or cobra pose, up dog. Have I stalled long enough?

BHARATH SRIVATSAN: Honestly, I was going to let you keep going but, yeah, I think we’re good.

Just like before, all I had to do was copy and paste a few short snippets of code. Let’s take a look at what this enables. First, my yoga studio’s earnings can now be stored long-term within this financial account. They can also get loan offers right from my Pose dashboard, and my studios can now create expense cards so that their instructors can buy things like yoga mats and blocks. And the best thing is, because this is all done through Stripe, funds are immediately available to spend right from their Pose balance.

ALEX VOGENTHALER: Being the home for this financial activity puts Pose in a very privileged position with their users. Outside of these embedded components, we unfortunately don’t have time to show all the other updates to our financial services products, like the new Issuing fraud tools. Even though they’re outperforming industry benchmarks by 5 to 10 times, they didn’t make the cut for today.

We are investing in this area because embedded finance is taking off, and we see it in the stats. Last year, we shared that platforms running on Stripe had issued more than 100 million cards to their users. That number has now almost doubled to 199 million. I was really hoping for 200 the week of Sessions. Didn’t quite make it, but maybe in a few days. We’re seeing treasury funds stored via platforms growing in excess of 240% year on year. In 2023, businesses received over $1 billion in financing through Stripe Capital. Across our largest users, we see financial services revenue outgrowing payments revenue by as much as 11 times. That really validates all the effort that you are putting into investing in embedded finance use cases beyond payments.

Now the CMO of Lightspeed is going to share how they’ve used all of these capabilities to deepen their relationships with their users. Please welcome Kady Srinivasan.

KADY SRINIVASAN: Thank you, Alex. Great to be here. Lightspeed started out as an in-person POS provider with an iPad interface using other providers for the actual payments processing. Now, two decades later and following nine acquisitions since our IPO, we offer flagship products in retail, hospitality, and golf in over a hundred countries. We have amazing customers. Innovators from Five Guys to Nordstrom partner with us to be the go-to destination in their space.

In 2019, we decided to build our own global payments platform in-house to provide a truly holistic solution for our customers. We needed a partner that could support our global ambitions but also our customers’ complex omnichannel businesses. That’s when we did a comprehensive review of the market and we came to Stripe. With the combination of Stripe Connect and Stripe Terminal, we were able to build our own in-person and online payments business in the countries we wanted to operate in.

What really surprised us was that Stripe had best-in-class reliability and ease of use across the board, not just in top markets but in all of the countries that we wanted to operate in so that we could serve our customers to the same standard everywhere. And building our own payments products with Stripe meant a better user experience, lower churn, and higher adoption. But in turn, customers love being able to run their whole business on this platform end to end. Since then, our global payments volume has grown significantly year over year, and payments now contributes more than 50% of our revenue.

We’ve also continued our global expansion. For example, we own a significant amount of market share in the Benelux countries. And as of last fall, our customers in those countries now have access to our retail payments product thanks to Stripe. We’ve also expanded into financial services, offering our customers the growth funding that they need with Lightspeed Capital that’s built on Stripe Capital. We’ve also just launched a new iPad stand that also holds a custom Stripe Terminal reader, enabling our customers to offer a more seamless payments experience. We’re really excited for what we’ll build together next. Thank you.

ALEX VOGENTHALER: Thank you, Kady. Well that’s the whirlwind tour of our last year on Connect and embedded financial services. We’ve enabled you to tailor Connect to your needs, launched 17 embedded components, a new Merchant Risk and Compliance platform, pricing tools, support functionality, and updates across our embedded finance products. Even if today you don’t think of your company as a platform or marketplace, there are almost certainly ways you can use all of this to extend your business in new directions. Now, to share what’s new in our Revenue and Finance Automation Suite, here’s Sharmeen.

SHARMEEN BROWAREK CHAPP: We’re going to shift gears now and talk about the tools we’re building for orchestrating your revenue. A consequence of the internet is that revenue models are becoming more complicated. Let me say that again. Revenue models are going to be more complicated because of the internet. A one-size-fits-all approach to revenue used to work well. If you were selling to a lot of customers, you did so through distributors. Your tools were very blunt, you didn’t have real-time observability, and you couldn’t implement dynamic pricing. Today, you can have direct-to-customer businesses selling to millions of customers or have marketplaces with diverse participants, and you’re now able to bill in precise ways based on seats or on usage or any combination of things like that.

We’ve heard from you that there are no good off-the-shelf solutions. We live in a wild world where my phone can remind me every week just how much my screen time has gone up. And it’s not good, y’all, but it is incredibly hard for businesses to say exactly what their revenue was yesterday. We think that the revenue platform of the future is yet to be built, and we’re committed to making it happen. At Sessions last year, we unveiled our Revenue and Finance Automation Suite. Today it consists of these six products. We want to help you handle your entire revenue cycle from invoices, billing, and taxes to revenue recognition and reporting. We call it RFA for short. More than 300,000 companies are using RFA products, including Cloudflare, GitHub, Atlassian, and Figma. RFA will pass a $500 million annual revenue run rate in the coming months.

So what’s new today? A lot. Let’s start with Stripe Billing, the cornerstone of our RFA Suite. It’s where you set up your revenue calculation and collection logic. Over the last few years, we’ve noticed a significant shift. Usage-based billing has become more popular among software companies, particularly in the AI industry because inference costs are very real. Today, over 80% of SaaS companies already do or plan to charge based on usage. We know how important usage-based billing is. It’s how Stripe has always worked, but we haven’t comprehensively supported it in Stripe Billing. Well, we’re fixing it today. We now enable usage-based billing with our new Meters API.

You can ingest usage data in real time, connect it to your pricing, ensure accurate billing based on usage, and cohesively integrate it with the rest of the RFA Suite for end-to-end management of usage-based revenue. Let’s take a look at it in action with the help of our CTO, David Singleton. David, take it away.

DAVID SINGLETON: Thanks, Sharmeen. Meet our demo company Hypernian, which makes products for creative professionals. Let’s imagine that I work at Hypernian for the purposes of this demo, and we want to launch a new AI-powered service that does language translation. And we want to charge by the number of words translated like a modern-day Charles Dickens. Our CEO wants to announce it on our earnings call in two weeks. I just talked to the eng[ineering] team, and it’s going to take us several months to develop the billing logic in-house. You might say it’s the best of times and it’s the worst of times. But Stripe Billing just launched support for usage-based billing, so let’s see if we can get it done faster that way. So let’s take a look. Here is Hypernian’s Stripe Dashboard. Before we can bill for usage, we need to measure it, and we do that with a Meter. Let’s go ahead and create a new one here. I’m going to give it a name. We’ll call it “Words translated.”

The cool thing about Meters is that they can also gather data about custom keys so that I can use them for kind of application-specific analysis later. I really care for my service about the source language and the language that we’re translating into. Great, let’s go ahead and make it, and take a look. Meter is being created and there is even a little code snippet there that we can use to get started in our integration. And in fact, let’s do that right now. So check this out. This is Hypernian’s actual code for their translation API. You can see it’s mostly complete here. We’re counting the words already. We’re passing it off the backend to do the actual translation. So all that remains is to report that usage to Stripe so that we can bill for it.

Alright, Stripe’s Docs are pretty good, and I could go off and figure out how to do this in Python over there, but let’s see if we can get that done even more quickly using Stripe’s soon-to-be-available extension to GitHub, Copilot. So this is GitHub Copilot in VS code, but I can actually talk directly to Stripe. This is an agent that we’ve trained on all of our docs and examples, and I can ask it how to create a Meter event. So I’m going to go ahead and hit “Enter” here. It’s generating a code snippet and looks pretty good. I’ll move that over into my code. You can see here, of course, we want to charge based on the word count and that’s all there is to it. It’s getting the reporting, aggregating by customer.

Now of course, any good software engineer will tell you that once you write code, you need to test it. I have a handy little load test that I’ve been using for the translation service right here. Let’s kick it off, and it’s ready to go. So I will go ahead. Three, two, one. Off it goes. We’re sending hundreds of requests per second to the translation API. Let’s see how that looks on the Stripe Dashboard. So go over to Meters here, open up that Meter and look at this, live usage being reported in real time to Stripe, and you can see all the details, all the customers, and the number of words translated.

And it doesn’t even stop there. Look at this. I can go into “Aggregated usage,” view “Details.” Remember that translation language that I added earlier? Let’s look at that. You can see that live reporting broken down by the translation language. We can see here Korean and Spanish are pretty popular, so maybe I’ll go and scale up the machines that handle those languages. So just 90 seconds ago, charging customers by usage seemed very challenging, but now with a few simple steps you get up and running with Stripe Billing’s new Meters API, which is available today.

We also said earlier that we help you implement richer revenue models. You’ve been able to implement bespoke models on Stripe for years by writing code that responds to our webhook events. But you’ve been asking for Stripe to handle more of that complexity for you, to be able to express the intricate logic of your businesses on our systems. You can now set up trigger-based workflows to orchestrate your revenue model directly in the Stripe Dashboard. We’re calling it Automations. Let’s take a look.

So we’re back in the Hypernian Dashboard here. I’ll head over to our Automation settings, and I’m going to make a new one. What I would like to do is to offer a $12 credit for new customers of this translation API. With Automations, I can choose from a range of triggers. In this case, it’s going to be when a new customer is created. And for every new customer, let’s sign them up for the correct plan, and we’re going to credit their customer balance by those $12 to help them check out the service. I’ll go ahead and hit “Publish.” And that’s it; it’s that easy. One flow in the Dashboard saved me from writing hundreds of lines of code. And this is a real paradigm shift. Yeah, it’s a real paradigm shift in how you can integrate with Stripe.

And today we’re adding Automations for some of the most popular workflows. Stripe Billing users like Linear and Intercom are already using Automations for revenue recovery and production. We’re going to enable more parts of your software-defined financial services stack using Automations over time.

Today we’re also announcing a raft of other new features for Stripe Billing. So I’m going to go through this quickly. You can now provision access to features based on customers’ billing plans with our new Entitlements API. With our new Invoice Preview API, you can give your customers a sneak peek at what’s to come in their invoices so they don’t have to wait with great expectations. With advanced discounting, you can now easily offer an enterprise prospect a standard 10% discount for large base volume plus an additional 10% off for usage going beyond the threshold on the same subscription plan. And everything we just talked about is generally available right now.

We also know that transitioning to new billing systems can be a fraught experience. So we’ve been rolling out a new no-code migration toolkit to help you switch to Stripe Billing easily. With these updates, we think Stripe Billing will make it easier to adapt your business as the world changes around us. Back to you, Sharmeen.

SHARMEEN BROWAREK CHAPP: Thanks, David. The next pillar of our RFA Suite is Tax. Part of what makes handling taxes tricky is that it’s both continually changing and extremely intricate. For example, Florida now exempts admission fees for sports events in their tax-free holidays. This year, Estonia increased its standard VAT rate from 20 to 22% while Switzerland increased it from 7.7 to 8.1%. We have teams of people who ingest thousands of tax rule changes and ensure that every product category is mapped correctly. Stripe Tax now works in 57 countries and is used by the likes of Duolingo, FICO, and Roblox. We’re launching two huge upgrades to Stripe Tax starting later this year. We will help you auto-register and auto-file for sales taxes across the United States.

This fits squarely with our mission of growing the GDP of the internet by helping you handle the unglamorous minutiae. In addition to what we covered today, there’s a bunch of new stuff in our other RFA products. For example, a top request from many of you has been for Stripe to give you a more complete picture of your business. You can now import your transactions from Google Play1 and Apple App Store®2 to consolidate revenue recognition on Stripe.

To sum up, with our RFA Suite, you can better handle the complexities of revenue model changes, using new upgrades we have announced today including usage-based billing, tax registration and filing, Automations, and feature access provision. We have an extraordinarily ambitious roadmap, and we’re very keen to help you grow faster with a modern revenue platform. One customer who’s had great success moving quickly with RFA is Anthropic, the AI company behind the popular large language model, Claude. Please welcome to the stage the cofounder and president of Anthropic, Daniela Amodei.

DANIELA AMODEI: Hi, everyone. So, to start, more than a decade ago, long before founding Anthropic, I joined a tiny startup of around 45 people called Stripe. There’s a lot that I carry with me into my work at Anthropic from my experience at Stripe. I learned a lot about the value of safe and trusted technology during the time I spent helping to build Stripe’s risk program. For those not familiar, Anthropic is dedicated to researching and building some of the world’s most reliable, trusted, and steerable AI systems. This is why so many companies, from the most exciting startups to large enterprises across every industry, trust Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, with their businesses. Claude is designed to work with every individual across every team, from sales and marketing to finance and engineering, whether improving customer support, analyzing complex documents and data-generating code, or creating content and visuals. There’s almost nothing Claude can’t do.

We count on Stripe [for] scaling our business so we can focus on innovating and serving our customers. For Claude Pro, which includes Claude Opus—the world’s most powerful AI model—we use Stripe Billing to manage subscriptions. For our Enterprise 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. And of course, we use Link for one-click payments. Thank you to the Stripe team for your partnership and your shared obsession with putting our customers first. We can’t wait to see what we’ll do together next. Thank you.

WILL GAYBRICK: Thank you, Daniela. Now, we covered a lot of ground today, from payment method A/B testing to usage-based billing and a whole lot in between. In fact, we only covered a fraction. Here I’m highlighting everything we discussed. As you can see, there is a whole lot that we didn’t get to. So we created a comprehensive changelog on our website. You can go to stripe.com/changelog, and you can see everything that’s new since Sessions last year.

Before we wrap up, I wanted to share a foundational update on how we’re thinking about the ecosystem [in] which Stripe operates. We’ve long believed that global commerce and money movement is a team sport, and you all work at some of the most sophisticated companies in the world. As John and Patrick mentioned at the beginning, you’ve been asking for years to make Stripe more modular and interoperable so that our services can fit into your existing technology stack. So over the past few years, we’ve quietly made several of Stripe services work better with other PSPs. Today we’re taking this one step further. We’re extending our modularity to the very core of Stripe payments processing. We’re launching our Vault and Forward API so that you can use even more of Stripe with other payments processors. In particular, as of today, this moment, you can use our Optimized Checkout Suite and everything we showed you in the first 15 minutes of this keynote with other PSPs.

Helping you all manage the complexity of running multiple processors will be a major investment area for us. So we’re just at the starting blocks. We want to hear your feedback and wishlists, so come talk to us. Now, users like Mindbody and Blackbaud are already up and running with Vault and Forward, and this service is available to all of you as of today. Now, we also just showed you a bunch of upgrades to Stripe Billing and Radar. What we didn’t say was [that] Stripe Billing and Radar will work seamlessly with other PSPs by the end of the year. So three of Stripe’s widely used services—the Optimized Checkout Suite, Billing, and Radar—will work with other PSPs. Going forward is a general architectural principle. All of Stripe’s products will gracefully interoperate with third-party processors.

It’s a big deal. We’re excited about it. Now, please don’t get me wrong. Payments is the beating heart of Stripe, and we do want you all to use Stripe for payments processing, but we want you to do so because we have the highest auth rates, the best payment method coverage, the best developer experience, and the highest reliability—not because you’ve been sort of technologically coerced by all the great services right next to payments. As we open up Stripe services to interoperate with the rest of the payments ecosystem, we’re also creating new vectors for partners to extend Stripe’s capabilities. So, for example, in certain markets, we’re working with local payments leaders to get you all more coverage. Now, take South Korea, the world’s 13th largest economy. I’m excited to announce that Stripe has partnered with the Korean PSP Nice Pay to get you localized coverage faster. So with a mere toggle in the Dashboard, you can now give your customers a fully localized experience. This includes all local card issuers. There’s more than 20 of them. Four local wallets, local currency presentment, and as usual, end-to-end reporting and settlement. Perhaps best of all, you don’t even need a Korean entity.

So... there’s more. Via partnerships like this one, we’ll be bringing you localized coverage in other major markets around the world. Nigeria is up next in July, soon to be followed by Indonesia, and others in 2025.

Now we also showed you that we’ve more than doubled the number of payment methods you can access via Stripe from 50 to more than 100. What we didn’t say was payment methods are now reverse-integrating themselves to Stripe. Revolut Pay, Amazon Pay, Alma, Sunbit, and more than a dozen others are already doing this. So an ecosystem is accelerating your global coverage.

Of course, an ecosystem of ISVs is integrating Stripe with third-party applications. In the last year alone, we’ve more than doubled the number of apps in the Stripe App Marketplace, from 70 to 150. This includes new apps for Adobe and NetSuite, alongside existing apps for Xero and Mailchimp. Partners have added a ton of new connectors to systems like Oracle OPERA and Cegid.

We’re also extending our partnership with Salesforce. Going forward, Stripe will be the default payments provider for Commerce Cloud, and we’ll work together to provide high-touch support for our joint customers. This list could go on and on, from the large financial institutions that originate the loans for platforms that Alex talked about, to issuers joining the Enhanced Issuer Network, all the way to certified architects and solopreneurs writing and maintaining specialized plugins.

So global commerce and money movement is a team sport. Our mission to grow the GDP of the internet is a team sport. Ultimately, this ecosystem view of economic growth is emblematic, why we are all here together today at Stripe Sessions. Hopefully, you do leave this room with some specific ideas about how Stripe can help you increase your conversion rates, grow your embedded payments business, evolve your business model, and so on. But there’s also something deeper at play. All of you in this room are at the forefront of the internet economy, which is to say you are at the forefront of the economy. And the next decade of global economic growth will be shaped disproportionately by what each of you does and what we can do together. Thank you and enjoy Stripe Sessions. (Audience applauding.)

Footnotes

1. Google Play is a trademark of Google LLC.
   
2. Apple and App Store are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the US and other countries and regions.