KATHLEEN KRANZLIN: Hi everyone, I'm Kathleen Kranzlin, product marketer for Payments. Earlier today you heard all about the updates we're making across the three pillars of Stripe's portfolio. Global payments helps you optimize the payments experience for every customer, anywhere in the world. Embedded payments and finance to help you extend your platform's offerings beyond core payments. And revenue and finance automation to help you monetize in new ways, and in more markets...

In this talk, we'll cover our global payments roadmap and dive deeper into what's to come. Everything we build starts with our customers. Millions of businesses use Stripe to accept payments, grow revenue, and accelerate new business opportunities. And from these conversations we've had with you all, we've heard a couple of key themes. You want better payments performance to help you increase revenue, minimize fraud, and lower costs. You want to provide localized buyer experiences without the operational toil so you can expand to new markets faster and better serve your global customers. And you want Stripe to be more interoperable so that we're plug-and-play with the rest of your existing payment stack.

Well, we heard you. Over the next 20 minutes, we'll share what you can expect from our roadmap across these three areas, this year and beyond. Now with any roadmap, it's possible that some of these areas might change as we evolve what we build based on your feedback. So let's start with how we're helping you get the best payments performance. I'd like to welcome Marcia Jung, product lead for payments performance. Marcia is our resident expert at figuring out how payments can be a lever to help you make more money on every transaction. Marcia, over to you.

MARCIA JUNG: Great, thanks Kathleen. That's exactly right. Every basis point matters, especially when you operate at the scale that many of you do. So, you've done the hard work to get your customers to click “Buy” or “Subscribe,” but your job is hardly over there. You face a constant tug of war to maximize acceptance and really provide the best possible customer experience while also fighting fraud to minimize your losses. And this balancing act is only getting harder to do right. You have new regulatory changes that are popping up, new, different fraud types, and more.

At Stripe, we're helping you manage that complexity for you, while also giving you the tools to customize our products to your specific needs. Today, I'm excited to highlight our roadmap, designed to give you easy access to all the features you need to run a truly optimized global payment stack. This includes capabilities across the full payments lifecycle, from authorization, to cost, to fraud, all the way through to disputes, and to deliver highly personalized optimizations and recommendations to customize these features to your specific business needs. This is all in the service of helping you squeeze out every bit of value from your payments.

Let's start with our enterprise acquiring and authorization features. At Stripe, we partnered closely with the global card networks to make sure you have access to the latest features and capabilities that the networks have to offer. These are things like network tokens and real-time card account updater, which we offer in over 45 different markets. And also features like extended auth windows and multicapture, as well as local debit rails like PINless debit in the US. Users like Hertz and Uber rely on these features today to help maximize auth rates, lower their costs, and also create better experiences like seamless tipping. And over the next year, we'll continue to add support for the latest network card capabilities.

So, for example, in the second half of the year, we'll be adding support for hotel and car rental metadata for users who are in the travel industry to help you lower your network costs. We'll also be expanding features like extended auth windows and multicapture to more networks like Cartes Bancaires in France. Moving on to authentication. Depending on the region, you're actually required to authenticate payments with the goal of reducing fraud in the ecosystem. But adding this friction to your flow can actually cause customers to drop off from your payments flow by up to 20%.

We recently launched an upgraded ML-based authentication engine, and thanks to this engine, we're able to shrink the number of 3DS challenges while also reducing fraud by 8%. And this is all while ensuring that you stay compliant with local regulations. We're also focused on enabling more flexibility and customization for different payment flows. So whether you want to use Stripe for both authentication as well as payments processing, or as part of a multiprocessor setup, we'll have a solution for you. Today, 3DS import is available if you authenticate outside of Stripe. And later this year we're launching 3DS as a standalone service so that you can use our authentication on all of your global payments volume, whether that's on Stripe or elsewhere.

Next, for fraud, Radar has reduced dispute rates by over 10% in the last year alone. With the launch of Fraud Insights and Radar Assistant this morning, we've made it dramatically easier to write effective custom rules for your business. And later this year we'll extend Radar's robust machine-learning productions to include more payment methods, starting with ACH and SEPA. And we'll also be launching a brand new Radar API later this year so you can use our ML-based fraud scores in your own custom fraud stack.

Finally, in the case of a dispute, we're also helping you manage that too. Last year we launched support for Visa's Compelling Evidence 3.0 program and we saw dispute win-rates more than double. In the second half of the year, we'll be launching API support for this program, and we'll also be launching an integration with Visa's Verifi Solutions to help you reduce dispute rates and get you out of monitoring programs.

In addition to giving you access to a ton of features you need, we also optimize how these features are being used to get the best performance out of Stripe. So for example, our Advanced Payments Engine helps you decide things like, “How should I format my auth message?” “Does it vary by issuer?” “If a transaction is declined, should I be retrying it? If so, on what rails?” We look at everything we know about a transaction, a card, an issuer, across the entire Stripe global network, and we use AI to make these decisions in real-time. And this approach has helped users like Twilio and River Island improve auth rates by over 3% when moving to Stripe. And it's also a big reason why Forrester Wave recently recognized Stripe with a perfect score in payments performance optimization.

Looking ahead, the next big focus area for our roadmap is in personalizing the Advanced Payments Engine for your specific business. We'll take into account how trade-offs across authorization, fraud, and cost vary from business to business. So for example, a SaaS business or an online retailer may take very different views of this trade-off and so we're going to treat them differently.

As I mentioned, the payments engine is designed to do the heavy lifting for you, but we also know that some of you want more control over changes to your setup, and that's where personalized recommendations come in. Stripe has a team of dedicated experts to work with you to get the best performance out of Stripe. And later this year, we're bringing this deep expertise to you directly in the dashboard through our Payments Insights Hub. With this new Payments Insights Hub, you'll be able to dig into where in the funnel are my customers dropping off? You'll also get personalized recommendations like which payment methods to add, when to be triggering 3DS, all delivered at your fingertips. And most importantly, you'll see the estimated dollar impact for your business for each of these changes.

This will help you more easily understand where to be prioritizing resources to really move the needle on your business. So whether you want Stripe to automatically optimize your payments for you or fine-tune it yourself, we're really helping you extract the most value out of every transaction. And with that, I'd love to introduce Angel Maredia, product manager on our Payments team, and she's going to walk you through what we're building to help you create better buyer experiences anywhere you want to sell.

ANGEL MAREDIA: Thanks, Marcia. Today, it's easier than ever for customers around the world to discover new products and services. Borders coming down for customers can be a boon for your business. But it hasn't really gotten easier for businesses to operate in new markets. Setting up operations in a new country requires evaluating localized prices, setting up legal entities, determining tax requirements, contracting with individual payment methods and banking partners. These are all complex and time-consuming processes

At Stripe, we're building tools to enable you to enter new markets as quickly as possible while still providing buyer experiences that feel native and familiar to every customer, wherever they are. The best way to do that is by leveraging our Optimized Checkout Suite, a set of tools and prebuilt payment UIs designed to optimize revenue and customize global payments experiences. One of the tools that we built in the Optimized Checkout Suite addresses the issue of local currency presentment. It's one of the most effective ways to boost conversion in new markets. In fact, 90% of buyers make a purchase in their local currency when given the option to do so.

Now, you could manually set static prices in each currency, but this can be problematic since FX rates are constantly in flux. Even the most volatile currency pairs of Australian dollars and US dollars can fluctuate pretty dramatically. So this leaves your business at risk for either underpricing your product in local currency, meaning lost revenue, or overpricing your product, meaning lower conversion. We built Adaptive Pricing so that you don't need to do this yourselves anymore. It ensures that your buyers will see local prices that are backed by the most up-to-date currency conversion rates. Users on Adaptive Pricing have seen an average of 17.8% uplift in cross-border revenue.

Now, those of you in the US, UK, Canada, and Eurozone can enable this in your Dashboard today. And we will continue to expand support globally. We're also expanding support from checkout and payment links to the Payment Element by the end of this year. Beyond localizing just prices, offering local payment methods can create powerful opportunities for highly converting checkouts. In fact, 85% of customers abandon their cart if their preferred payment method isn't offered.

Stripe today provides access to more than 100 payment methods, and this year we'll expand support to dozens more, including MobilePay, Reshnung, PayTo, which is a real-time payments provider in Australia, and even crypto. Now, we've also heard from you that you're seeing your greatest areas of economic opportunity in regions like Germany, UK, France, Australia, Japan. So you can expect to see more of a focus on those regions this year. Now, while we're increasing the number of payment methods that we offer, we've also heard from you that you need additional controls to manage those payment methods. For example, you may only want to show certain payment methods for a particular cart value.

We've launched our Payment Method Rules Engine to allow you to set custom rules for which payment methods show up right from the Stripe Dashboard, no code required. Businesses using the Payment Element can also now A/B test payment methods with no code. You'll better understand the business impact each payment method will have across revenue, conversion, AOV, share of wallet without using expensive dev and data science resources. Later this year, we'll roll out these capabilities to businesses using Checkout and Billing.

Now, while offering additional payment methods can have a huge impact on your revenue, some markets have especially high payment method fragmentation. Take South Korea, where no single payment method is predominant. Customers use dozens of local cards and wallets, and setting up every Korean payment method to get 100% penetration on your own would be incredibly resource-intensive. What's more is that some markets have additional challenges like regulatory complexity and data localization requirements. These are difficult problems for us to tackle, let alone businesses that have a ton of other concerns outside of ensuring that payments operate effectively.

So to help you localize your buyer experience in these highly fragmented markets, we're integrating with local partners and building their deep payment stack right into Stripe. This local-market access model is now live in South Korea and gives you coverage across all local cards and four wallets. That's near complete local payment method coverage. For you, this means, one, higher revenue. We're seeing upward of 98% auth rates on Korean cards. Two, no integration changes if you are on our optimized payment services like the Payment Element or Checkout. And then finally, three, no need to set up a local entity to accept these payment methods.

We'll expand this local market access to Nigeria in July, and Indonesia by the end of this year, with many more countries along the way. Now, to close this out here and to tie this all together, the impact of everything I've just talked about is significant. Businesses who use the Optimized Checkout Suite saw 11.9% more revenue on average. So our vision is to lower the barrier to entry to going global, enabling you to create hyper-local buyer experiences that maximize conversion, authentication, and ultimately, your top-line revenue. For our last payments roadmap theme, I'll hand it over to Roshan Sadanani, product lead for Payment APIs, to talk about how we're creating a more open ecosystem.

ROSHAN SADANANI: Thanks. All right. Thank you so much, Angel. You've heard a lot today about how we're relentlessly focused on optimization and conversion, ensuring that you're capturing as much revenue as possible. We want to spend a few minutes, though, zooming out a bit to share how we're shifting our approach to product development and thinking about an open payments ecosystem.

We know many of you have come to Stripe excited by the things we just talked about, but with existing integrations that are difficult to change. We have some good news. If you're working with multiple processing partners, we're working to embrace flexibility and composability in our stack so that you can use Stripe to power those integrations. To do this, we're launching features that enable interoperability with other processors outside of Stripe. Now, Stripe Tax is already in this category. You can use the Stripe Tax API in standalone mode with any or multiple processors. And you heard a little bit earlier from Marcia about our plans to support 3DS in standalone mode as well. This year we'll also make it possible to use your own shipping, tax, or business logic with Embedded Checkout. The idea here [is] to make Stripe more flexible to meet your needs.

As of today, we're also announcing another flexible offering. Stripe's Payment Element is now interoperable with other processors. This change is made possible through our new Vault and Forward API. This means you get the benefits of Stripe's Optimized Checkout Suite, all the good stuff you heard earlier like A/B testing and dynamic payment methods, but even if other companies are processing the payments. And, you can manage a phased rollout of Stripe into your payments infrastructure. We know that handling multiple processors can be complex. Some of you who've built these integrations know that as well, but we don't think you should have to increase the size of your payments team tenfold in order to get the advantages.

In the future, you'll be able to do things like leverage our vaulting capabilities across network tokens and card account updaters, backed by our five nines of reliability. You'll be able to unify transactions including reporting and reconciliation into Stripe's APIs and Dashboards. And you'll be able to use additional Stripe products like Stripe Billing and Stripe Radar with any payment processor.

Our Vault and Forward API, today, supports six processors, and we're continuously adding more integrations. I really do want to underpin that we're making deep investments in this space to give you access to more of our infrastructure so that you can grow faster. Stripe Billing and Radar will work with other PSPs by the end of this year. And we want to hear about other tools that you'd like us to modularize first. Please do let us know—we'd love to hear from you about that.

Now, our open ecosystem ambitions extend beyond online payments. We're continuing to make deep investments in unified commerce as well, allowing you to design a seamless customer experience wherever your customers transact, whether that's online sales or in person. So, let's spend a minute talking about in-person payments. Stripe's hardware ecosystem is rapidly expanding. Stripe Reader S700, our latest smart reader, is now available in 23 countries globally. It allows you to use prebuilt elements on the card reader to accept customer information, like an email for an email receipt, or you can run your entire point-of-sale application on the device itself for a customized, all-in-one software offering. No more fumbling with multiple devices at checkout.

But we also understand that this may not work for every business, and that many of you want even more customization, down to the hardware. We're excited to share that we're also investing in hardware composability with partners like Elo and Sumni to enable you to build custom hardware by embedding Stripe components in third-party devices. Some examples of this are this touchscreen device provided by Sumni, which is great for ordering food. Or a handheld device with a printer, which has been popular with users like Oddle and HitPay for tableside ordering and checkout. These devices are actually on demo in our unified commerce booth now, so we'd invite you to swing by and check those out in person.

Of course, in-person payments have evolved beyond hardware too. Last year we announced Tap to Pay on iPhone to power a new generation of in-person checkouts. Tap to Pay enables you to accept in-person payments with only an iPhone or Android device and no dedicated payments hardware. We're making deep investments here too. Tap to Pay on iPhone is now available in Australia, the UK, and the US, where Alaska Airlines is using it for in-flight purchases at 40,000 feet. Tap to Pay on Android is now available in 23 countries.

Lastly, we're making it easier for even the largest of businesses to embed Stripe's in-person payments in their existing stack through new point-of-sale and PMS integrations with providers including Oracle OPERA, Cegid, and Adobe Commerce. On the features front, we're adding support for the payments capabilities you all have asked for, like offline mode, dynamic currency conversion, surcharging, and expanded fleet management. We're also adding new payment methods to Stripe Terminal, like girocard in Germany and Cartes Bancaires in France, this year.

So as you can tell, we're working on a lot in payments and there's even more here that we haven't had time to share. If there's one thing we want you to leave this talk with, it's that at Stripe, we're continuing to obsess about the details when it comes to payments so that you don't have to. With that, we're going to take some questions and so I'd like to invite our other speakers back on stage.

KATHLEEN KRANZLIN: All right, so payment methods have been a little bit of a theme so far today. What other payment methods are on the roadmap? Angel?

ANGEL MAREDIA: Yeah, let me just take a step back and actually talk about how we think about payment methods more broadly. So, I like to think about them in terms of two goals. There's “how do I increase reach or depth in a particular market?” And then there's a second goal of “how do I actually go increase my sales or go enter into a net new market?” So let's take that first bucket of increasing reach or depth. As I highlighted earlier, we've heard from a lot of you that Germany, UK, Japan, Australia, France… that these are really regions where you're seeing a lot of opportunity. So we're shipping payment methods there. Like I said, MobilePay, Reshnung, we have Revolut Pay coming out, PayTo is also coming out in those regions. So that's just like a subset of the giant list that came up behind me.

That doesn't mean that we're just focused on those regions. So we have Twin, Swish, StatusPay, just like name a couple that are in other regions as well, but you're going to see a big focus in those regions in particular. And then the second goal of how do we increase sales and net new markets, that's the local-market access model that's live in Korea today. And I think what makes us really excited about it is that if you're using our Optimized Checkout Suite, you really don't need to do much to go just suddenly sell into a new market. No integration changes, no local entity, no changes to the back office. So we're really excited about that as a way to really enable you all to go sell into new markets much faster than ever before.

KATHLEEN KRANZLIN: Thank you. As we heard in the talk as well, Stripe, focusing on making our payments platform interoperable and really plug-and-play with the existing payment stack is a bit of a shift. Roshan, can you tell us a little bit more about why Stripe is prioritizing interoperability?

ROSHAN SADANANI: Yeah, I think [for] a couple of reasons. I mean, one is it's strategically valuable for us, if we're thinking about it that way. I think we believe pretty strongly in the capabilities that we've built with our services offerings like Stripe Billing and Stripe Radar, which are a few of the ones that we named. And so we've had a lot of customers, like you all come to us and want to use those on their own.

And so part of it is there's a sort of strategic benefit for Stripe, but I think the other part of this is that we recognize that there's a lot of you who are operating with multiple processors and historically that has been a barrier to adopt some of those services. So it's sort of that we see an opportunity, but also we want to meet you all where you are when we've talked to you as part of those integrations. And so I think the dual nature of that is really what's caused that strategic shift for us. The other part I'll add is, I think there's a sort of... Yeah, let me just pause there. Yeah. Cool.

KATHLEEN KRANZLIN: Thanks for that additional insight. Switching gears a little bit: one of the questions we get a lot from our businesses [is about] how they can get better auth performance. Marcia, can you tell us a little bit about some of those levers our businesses should be focusing on?

MARCIA JUNG: Sure, where do I get started here? I could go on and on about it. But, you know, auth rates are very personal, right? So it varies from business to business, but if I had to summarize here, I would break it down into three parts. The first is, are you taking advantage of everything that the networks are offering here? So the things I mentioned around network tokens, a card account updater, those are really just basics. The second piece I think I would mention are some of Stripe's ML or AI-backed capabilities. So these are products like Adaptive Acceptance, as well as Smart Retries for the Billing customers. This is actually helping recover insufficient funds.

And the third piece, I think, when we think about auth rates is really partnerships with the ecosystem. So, really, it's the issuers that are ultimately making these authorization decisions. And so that's where we're really partnered with them on the Enhanced Issuer Network. We're actually sharing data signals so that we can make, jointly, more informed decisions there. And the last plug I will make is, again, on that Payments Insights Hub that's coming later this year. We're actually going to be surfacing personalized recommendations on how to improve things like auth rates and other performance metrics. So that, again, if you don't have access to me right now, we'll be able to surface more of that in the Dashboard.

KATHLEEN KRANZLIN: Awesome, thank you. You touched on ML and AI a little bit in your answer, so I'd like to open it up a little bit more. What role do you all see AI and ML playing in the future of Stripe's payments platform?

MARCIA JUNG: I can take this to start maybe. So I already mentioned, I think, about the Advanced Payments Engine and how we're leveraging ML and AI today to make all these micro-optimizations or decisions across the charge path. And so this is just a core pillar of how we think about payments performance. And so we're going to continue to invest very heavily in that, so that, again, we're getting every bit of value out of each payment.

And then I would say, sort of the second bucket is using ML and AI to improve productivity of our users on our platform. Those are some of the things that you've probably heard about around Radar Assistant or Sigma Assistant. We're helping users who are maybe less experienced with payments, get better, be able to get data and information and insights out of Stripe's products.

ROSHAN SADANANI: Yeah, I think like purpose-built AI is how I might describe that one for the user side of things. It's like, why write SQL when you can get an LLM to do that for you? And it turns out LLMs are pretty good at writing SQL once you train them on the right stuff, right? And I think that some of the Docs AI stuff that we're working on that was talked about in the keynote this morning is also, I think, quite interesting. It can make the integration time to go live much faster with Stripe. And so I think some of those investments are really exciting to see and we'll probably double down on quite a bit of those too.

ANGEL MAREDIA: Plus one to that. I think we also talked a lot about payments performance, but ML also plays a role when it comes to our Optimized Checkout Suite as well, when it comes to dynamic payment methods, showing which payment methods we think are higher-converting for your buyers. So it really is like a thread that goes through all of our products from buyer experience, payments performance, to Radar, and to Billing. So it's a thread that's underpinning a lot of our Stripe development.

KATHLEEN KRANZLIN: All right, I think that's all the time that we have. We hope this preview into what our Payments team is building has been valuable to you all. To learn more about what we're building and talk to any of our experts here or to ask any questions that we didn't get to today, please make sure to come find us at the demo desks. Thank you, everyone.

ROSHAN SADANANI: Thank you.