CHRISTIAN DICARLO: All right. Welcome everyone to the platform roadmap breakout, where we’ll go deeper into the most impactful product launches for platforms. Come on in, grab a seat, everyone. How’s everyone’s Sessions going so far? How was the morning? Come on, how was the morning? All right. So everyone in this room knows that AI has introduced a really important question. How resilient is your business model in the face of this generational technology shift? I’m Christian DiCarlo. I spent the last 10 years at Stripe working exclusively with platforms like yours to help answer questions like this. Over the past decade, we’ve seen fintech transform from an interesting experiment to a bolt-on set of features to now being one of the most impactful ways that you can drive defensibility and build a moat around your business. Today, over 16,000 software platforms on Stripe offer financial products to their customers. And this spans hundreds of industries—whether that’s Granum for arborists, Piano in the media space, or Procede Software in heavy-duty trucking.

Platforms on Stripe serve nearly every sector of the economy, and nearly a thousand of them are here today at Sessions, including the likes of Cloudbeds in hospitality, GlossGenius in beauty, and Lightspeed in retail, just to name a few. We’re really honored to have several of our platforms joining us onstage throughout the talks. They’ll be helping us tackle really some of the most important questions you’re all asking, such as: how is AI helping me open up new sales channels for my customers? How can I be improving my payments attach rate and expanding my take rate? Or, which products should we prioritize next on our roadmap? So make sure you check out these talks throughout today and tomorrow.

We know that durable and fast-growing revenue is top of mind for everyone in this room. And many of you want to know: what traits are we seeing across the breakout platforms on Stripe? So let’s dive in.

The first trait we’re seeing is that breakout platforms are deeply entrenched in how their users run their business. Take, for example, Moxie. It’s not just employee payroll. It’s how med spas stay compliant and protect their license. Or take Venue Ink. It’s not just appointment scheduling. It’s how tattoo artists sell and manage their artwork.

The second trait we see is that leaders are putting AI to work across their vertical. For example, SimplePractice isn’t just how you run your telehealth appointments. It’s your therapist’s AI notetaker to keep track of everything that’s covered. Or Clio—it’s not just case management. It’s your legal AI engine for case execution.

And the third trait we see, and frankly, I think is why we’re all here at the product breakout, is that breakout platforms have become the complete financial operating system for their users.

Leaders like Shopify now power every financial workflow. They’ve gone from how their users earn money, to how they store and manage funds, to how they access funds, and how they move and spend money. And so this is a retention and revenue flywheel that keeps spinning as you solve more high ROI problems for your customers.

And here’s the proof. Platforms on Stripe who have a multiproduct embedded payments and finance strategy see 50% higher revenue growth than those with just payments alone. And they experience a 40% increase in customer lifetime value. That’s massive, and that is how you build the moat.

So, which brings us to why you’re here today.

So we have thousands of engineers at Stripe building solutions for platforms, and that’s more R&D than any other company in our space, and your feedback shapes every line of code. And you’ve told us you want three things.

First, you want speed, so you can build and launch new products faster. Second, you want monetization to open up new revenue streams and expand your take rate. And third, you want scale to be able to grow your volumes confidently while mitigating risk. Over the next 25 minutes, we’re going to go deep on each of these areas and we’re going to illustrate how Stripe can help you build your moat and expand your lead. So now I’ll pass it over to our product leaders for the roadmap. Over to you, Jason.

JASON GUPTA: Thank you, Christian. Platforms keep asking us, “How can we move faster?” Roadmaps are stacked, delays mean losing ground, and development expectations have never been higher. Well, our goal is to help reduce your lift to just a few lines of code or even a few clicks. Today, I’m going to show you how across three areas: agentic development, embedded components, and turnkey embedded finance. Let’s get into it. And we’ve got to start with agentic development. Last year, we saw 10 times more LLM traffic to Stripe docs than the year before. So we optimized everything, all for agents. Our docs, APIs, SDKs. Your LLM can now understand Stripe right out of the box. And you can now build, test, and go live with Stripe products directly from your favorite vibe coding tools.

Take Biz Lab, who builds software for teachers. Their founder used Base44 to set up Connect for payments processing on their platform in only three hours of work. That’s hours, not days. That’s the new bar. And honestly, Biz Lab will probably offer a full financial suite to their users by the end of the week.

Now, of course, selling multiple products to the same users requires extensible infrastructure. And historically, integrating on Stripe involved multiple accounts for your users: one for their subscription, another one for their payments, and custom logic to link it all together. Well, you’ve told us that this slows you down, and it adds complexity for AI agents, and it makes launching new products harder than it needs to be. So we’ve completely redesigned the account architecture that powers the Stripe network. One account now does everything for your user. Paying subscriptions, accepting payments, making payouts, opening a financial account. This means that you can execute on a multiproduct strategy much faster. It enables agents to execute with minimal intervention, and it means that you maintain less code as you scale.

Okay, that’s agentic development. Next, let’s talk about embedded components. There are so many different financial UI workflows that you have to build to have an excellent product. Onboarding flows, payment forms, payout dashboards—and every platform rebuilds the same things. So we built them for you. We’re now up to 40 prebuilt components. Honestly, it’s starting to get hard to fit them all on a slide. We had to reduce the font size. These are full experiences that you can customize and drop into your code. Now, you might be thinking: can’t I just vibe code this? Well, sure you can—until compliance rules change, and you got to start collecting new information from your users, or you want to launch a new feature like Smart Disputes. With embedded components, we handle all of that for you. Compliance updates, security, new features, optimizations from the Stripe network. They’re all automatically built into the components that you embed. You ship once, and they just keep working.

Let’s take account onboarding. The Stripe network has now seen one in six businesses globally, and we’re putting that immense data to work for you.If we already know the business signing up to your platform, we’ll fast-track their onboarding to just one click. And we call this “networked onboarding.” The industry average for onboarding businesses to accept payments is three days. The Stripe average with networked onboarding is about five and a half minutes. This gives platforms like FreshBooks or MYOB, that are using networked onboarding through embedded components, a real advantage when it comes to driving payments adoption.

Another component that we’ve optimized for conversion is Capital. Your users need financing to grow, but many find it difficult and a stressful process that involves months of back and forth with the bank. Well, Stripe Capital helps you be a part of their solution. You can now offer access to financing directly in your platform to help users grow their business, and this is one of the strongest drivers of stickiness that we’ve seen.

Platforms in the Stripe partner program like Tekmetric, Jobber, and GlossGenius see an average 66% increase in net revenue when offering Capital and 146% increase in product adoption when implementing best practices. And today, we’re launching lines of credit. Your users draw what they need up to an improved limit, and they only pay fees on what they use. We’ve built this new form of capital directly into our existing components, so you can start offering a more flexible financing program without even lifting a finger.

But we’re not just improving our existing components. We’re also building new ones to help you move faster. Let me give you a few examples. Starting with Terminal, you can now use embedded components to help your users easily purchase, track, and manage devices or in-person payments. Stripe handles ordering, warehousing, delivering, and monitoring, and all you’ve got to do is embed the component.

Another is Instant Payouts, which lets you offer accelerated access to earnings. And you guessed it: there’s now a component for that, too. So your users can just click one button and get paid out instantly.

Now, of course, all these new funds flows, they make reconciliation harder. So, we built a component for balance reporting and another one for payout reconciliation reporting, so your users can easily track their money movement. And it’s not just web experiences. We’ve also made new components available in your React Native mobile applications. You can just customize them, brand them, and drop them into your code.

Okay, so I’ve covered Capital, Terminal, and Instant Payouts, but there are two other massive revenue opportunities for platforms that we touched on in the keynote: Treasury and Issuing. One of the breakout platforms on Stripe is PlayMetrics. They launched Treasury and Issuing to help youth sport club leaders store funds and manage expenses.

PlayMetrics quickly tripled their processing volumes and increased average revenue per account by 15%. These expansion products are some of the most effective ways to build a real moat around your platform. Your users no longer lose money and time cobbling together point solutions to store, manage, and move funds, and your platform gets to capture the value. But historically, becoming the financial home for your users was operationally brutal. It involved banking partners, compliance, fraud management, and more. And most platforms that I talk to just don’t have the resources. Well, in the keynote, we announced that we’re abstracting all of that away to help you move a lot faster. But I want to actually show you just how low the lift is with our new turnkey embedded finance solution. Let’s take a look.

Okay. So here we are in the Stripe Dashboard in the embedded Treasury tab, and we can click to get started. And we’ve preconfigured everything for you that you need, including the features for your users—like allowing them to pay bills or issue cards, fees, as well as cash rewards, so you can incentivize users to store money on your platform. When it comes to risk, we’ll handle risk for you, but if you manage risk for payments, we’ll make it easy for you to extend that coverage to your financial accounts with preconfigured rules with Stripe Radar. The integration is super easy. We’ve built a bunch of embedded components just for Treasury and Issuing, and you can just copy them over for your LLM. And finally, we’re even handling email communications for you with prepackaged communications. And that’s it. We just set up everything that we needed for an embedded finance program, and we’re ready to deploy.

Now, you’re probably wondering, “What does the experience look like for your users?” So let’s take a look. Here we’re in ZenFlow’s dashboard, and we’re looking at the experience from the perspective of one of their users, Sunrise Yoga. And like I mentioned, we’ve built a bunch of new embedded components, and you can see them in the purple borders here. Now, right from the ZenFlow dashboard, Sunrise Yoga can easily view their balances in multiple different currencies. They can view all of their recent transactions, and they can do the same for cards, they can do it for bills, they can do it for their recipients. And these components contain entire workflows, so they can easily send money by uploading a bill, or they can even create a card. So Maria Santos can get this beautiful ZenFlow orange card.

So we’ve built all of this, so that your users don’t have to leave your platform, and you can launch an embedded finance program much, much more easily than before. And here’s the best part: the more money that your users store with you, the more that you’re able to earn through a service fee from Stripe. And platforms are already jumping at this opportunity. Phorest, Joe Coffee, and CASHDROP, among others, will be some of the first to embed this directly into their offering.

Okay, so let’s bring this all together. You now have AI-friendly docs and consolidated V2 accounts that help your teams and agents build faster. You have 40 new embedded components, so you can ship once and they just keep working, and turnkey embedded finance, so you become the financial home for your users in just a few clicks. This is how we’re helping platforms on Stripe launch new, durable revenue streams fast. But building faster only matters if you can capture the value.

Here’s Kadry to show you how.

KADRY WESHAHY: Thanks, Jason. Our next focus is helping you grow and monetize your embedded finance business. 87% of vertical SaaS companies with an embedded finance offering now have a payments product in the portfolio. That’s up 57% from last year. So how do you turn that payment product into a growth engine? You told us the three questions that matter to you most: how do I win more users, improve my margins, and grow product adoption? And that’s how we shape the roadmap.

Let’s start with winning more users. So you’re competing upmarket, which means maybe serving more price-sensitive users who want to heavily optimize their cost and understand how that cost changes across factors like networks, card brands, card categories, and more.

Last year, we launched network cost passthrough in the US, which help you offer interchange-plus pricing to your users, transparently passing through the network cost and the transaction markup on top.

Since we launched, platforms like Tekmetric, DaySmart, and others have processed more than $100 million in that pricing model in no time. Some of them are even ramping up the volume more than 100% month over month. Today, I’m glad to share that network cost passthrough is available in 43 more countries, including the UK, France, and Germany. And we’ve built it right into the Stripe Dashboard, so that easily with a few clicks, you can enable it for a user, add your markup, and start processing. It also comes with built-in aggregated and transaction-level reporting, so that you and your users have the margin visibility you need to deeply understand your cost and segment your pricing based on how that cost changes over time.
It’s very simple to get started, but other users have a hard requirement: gross settlement. They would like, sometimes they need, their payments earnings up front, and the payment cease to be settled separately.

And that’s not a preference. This is a business constraint for accounting or compliance reasons. Soon, you’ll also be able to turn on gross settlement for users via the Stripe Dashboard and easily select the billing cadence and the funding source for collecting these payment fees. All right. These are two pricing controls to help you win more users, but controlling pricing is only one part of the equation.

Our vision is to help you monetize any fee you want in any way you want—whether it’s pathing through network cost, FX fees, marketing operator fees, or discounting local payment methods to drive their growth, which takes me to my second topic. How do you improve your margin and expand product adoption? Well, we know it’s not easy. Why? Two reasons. You have to be looking at months of your data just to understand your take rate, or identify the next cohort of users to launch a new product tool. The second reason is that sometimes, or maybe often, you’re only left with your own data for comparison. So with a quick show of hands, who wanted Stripe to offer benchmarking data?

Quite a few. I’m not surprised. It’s one of your most requested features, followed by tailored recommendations for how you can make more money through your embedded finance portfolio. These two capabilities really require the scale of Stripe’s network to be effective and actionable. So I’m glad to share that today, we’re giving you both, and also an easy way to act on them in the Stripe Dashboard, all in one place. That’s platform growth studio. Now, we’ve seen that in the keynote very briefly. I’d like to talk about a little bit more in this demo.

The first thing you see in the growth studio are the key business metrics that you would look at regularly to understand the health of your business—whether that’s your volume, earnings, or account growth. But does this mean that there is nothing else left for me to optimize? Let’s see. I can go to the recommendations that can see that growth studio has already identified few things for me to consider and has ordered these recommendations based on the impacts they have on my business.

We touched on the ACH improvement opportunity in the keynote. So in this demo, I’m going to be particularly interested in looking at that bottom right card that says, “Maybe I need to reconsider my pricing for manually entered cards.” Why? Because I am sitting at 125 bps below my industry benchmark. The industry benchmark, Stripe has calculated for me based on anonymized and generalized data across the Stripe network. So I’m digging deeper to learn more. The first thing I see is this chart. I can see my take rate in this green line below and the benchmark at the top in the orange line. And as I understand, I’m 125 bps below, because I’m actually losing 50 bps on that segment. So the first question that comes to mind: what do I do next? Well, growth studio also takes away the guesswork, because it has calculated two data points to help me guide my decision.

One that allows me to break even if I want to have a conservative go-to-market strategy. If I simulate it, I can see that it keeps my take rate at 0 bps—right between my current and the benchmark. It also gave me another data point: 3.5% to be on par with the benchmark, and you can see how the blue dotted line moves to tell me where I would sit. Now, I know my business more than anyone, and I have an aggressive go-to-market strategy. So I’d like to go ahead and charge more than the medium in the industry. Let’s say I’m going to go ahead and charge 3.8% as growth studio to simulate it, which back tests that fee across all my historical transaction data in one click, and I like where it sits. So next, I actually want to go ahead and update the pricing to reflect that fee.

Super easy. Update pricing. I can see that I already have a pricing scheme that allows me to charge for manually entered cards, but it’s currently charging 1%, which is maybe why I’m losing money. I’m going to change it to 3.8%, schedule it to happen maybe two weeks later—just to give me a chance to give my users heads up that a pricing change is coming—confirm, and that’s it. In a few clicks, I have a pricing change scheduled based on opportunity and the recommendation that growth studio offered me. But it doesn’t stop here, so let’s go back. Now, let’s take a look at this upper right card. Growth studio is telling me that I can launch buy now and pay later products via Affirm and Klarna. Why? Because it seems that more than 6,000 of my users can benefit from these products. They can offer installments to their customers, capture a higher order size, and it seems that I can stand to make more than $12,000 of margin if I turn on these products.

So I’m excited. I want to learn more. I go in and I see that growth studio has learned and identified that 60% of my users are eligible to use Affirm and Klarna, and are likely to use it if I offer it. So, how do I go about that? Again, I know my business and my users better than anyone, and I think maybe a promotional price can go a long way in nudging users to try these products. So I create a campaign. This campaign will allow me to discount Klarna and Affirm for a period of time. Let’s say this is going to be during the month of May.

All right. I give it a name and a period. I accept that I only want to cover Affirm and Klarna, but can always add more payment methods if I know my business. Now, I can also add any user I want, but growth studio has already curated for me a cohort of all eligible users. So I’ll just go ahead with that. The last thing is configure pricing. I know that I’m paying 6% and 30¢ for these two methods, so I’ll say maybe 50% discount for a month. So I’ll give it 3%, 15¢, continue, review, I’m happy, I’m going to schedule it. Here you go. Now it’s worth noting that platforms in the Stripe partner program who’ve executed promotional pricing campaigns for BNPLs realized incredible gains. Calendly, for example, saw up to 140% volume uplift, Intelligent Salon saw 900% volume uplift. You too can see these results in the campaigns tab after you execute a bunch of campaigns.

All right, so that’s growth studio, giving you the opportunity and a way to act on it. But you might have your own ideas, questions that you want to dig into deeper outside what Stripe is recommending. Let’s see how the Stripe Console can help you.

I’m going to ask the Console a question: “Am I losing money on users with above-average cross-border volume?” All right, I’m glad I was able to type this in one go. All right, let’s keep in mind, I started that query without knowing what is the average cross-border volume among my users, or which users sit above that average. The Console will do this for me. It will run the queries, synthesize the data, and offer me the answer in a format digestible that I can use to make decisions. It can also do a bunch of more things. You can ask it, “Can I expand into a new country, and how can I simulate a price, and how?” And you can see that it’s starting to offer me the results. I can see in this chart that it’s identified that at least three of my users fit the criteria that I requested.

One of them is net margin negative on the cross-border volume, but two are negative overall. And it’s also recommending that I should consider a pricing change, which I can easily do like we’ve seen a few minutes ago.

All right, so let’s bring it all back after the demo. We’re investing in key monetization capabilities to help you grow your business. We’re shipping new pricing controls to help you win more users, giving you growth studio powered by the Stripe network and the data, and expanding the Stripe Console to help you answer specific platform workflows. But growing that business is important; protecting it is equally important. Aakash, over to you.

AAKASH SAHNEY: Thanks, Kadry. Scaling your platform up means navigating new market shifts. And of course, last year we saw an entirely new kind of buyer in online channels: agents.

Agentic commerce moved from a hypothetical question of “What if?” to a very real and concrete question of, “What now?” To power this, we launched the Agentic Commerce Suite, a complete solution for selling on AI agents. And although we saw the earliest pull here from retail and physical goods, we’re now seeing a lot of interest across verticals—from hospitality, to services, to donations. I’m personally really excited to start booking my haircuts, my hotels, and my handyman from an LLM. So we’ve also launched the Agentic Commerce Suite for platforms, tailoring our solution to make it easy for platforms to get their users ready for agentic buying. You don’t have to build and rebuild integrations with dozens of different AI agents.

Instead, you build once and your users are ready across all of the AI agents that can support them. Commerce platforms like Wix, Woo, and Commerce have been building on our agentic commerce for platforms suite, and we’ll go live this quarter with Microsoft Copilot as a new growth channel for their users. And we’re making it really easy for platforms to get started. You go to the new agentic commerce section of Connect, select the agents you want to enable with a few clicks, configure a product feed with your user’s catalogs and inventories, and that’s pretty much it. Everything else works as usual. We’ll apply your existing processing fees and apply your Radar rules just like every other transaction. So that’s agentic commerce for platforms. We’re really excited about it. We’re unlocking a new way for users to scale up on your platforms. We’re of course super excited about how AI is changing the ways that people discover and buy products online, but we know it’s not all smooth sailing.

AI is also creating an entirely new terrain of risks and merchant fraud that you need to worry about across both agentic and traditional sales channels. In fact, three in four platform leaders tell us that fraud is now evolving too fast for their business to keep up. Bad actors are using generative AI to produce fake websites and business information and documents that can bypass many platforms, fraud, and verification systems. So this creates a really painful trade-off. On one end of the spectrum, opening the floodgates and taking on a massive amount of risk, and on the other end of the spectrum, making onboarding and interventions so onerous that you miss out on a lot of the good growth. So Stripe helps you to manage that trade-off with two products. First, Radar for platforms, a tool from Stripe that helps you manage the risk yourself. And second with Managed Risk, where we’ll handle the risk, we’ll decide which accounts to intervene on, and we’ll take liability for any financial losses.

Let’s start with Radar for platforms. Last year, we launched Radar for platforms to give you deeper insight and greater control when it comes to risk management. You can author and configure and customize rules for assessing connected accounts, and set up interventions like identity checks, payout pauses, or raise accounts for review when they meet certain criteria. Radar for platforms draws on signals from prior abuse across the entire Stripe network. So we’ll flag accounts that are using IP addresses or bank accounts that we’ve seen before that look like fraud. Platforms using Radar for platforms like StyleSeat, Vimeo, and FareHarbor are seeing five times lower losses per fraudulent account. It’s really become a critical tool for their risk teams. But you’ve told us that you want even more data to inform your decision-making. So let’s take a look at what’s new this year.

Okay. So here I am in my platform dashboard, looking at a list of accounts that match a Radar rule that I’ve previously written. I can see that Stripe is flagging two accounts as having the highest risk level, matching a rule that I had previously created. I’m going to click into Lauren Martin to see what’s going on. Okay. Right off the bat, I can see that the fraud score for Lauren Martin is at 95 out of 100, and Stripe’s recommended action is to reject the account entirely and offboard them. Before I do that, I’d like to see a little more information. So I’m going to take a look at the risk analysis. It looks like there are four indicators that Stripe is highlighting for me for this account. The first is a high-risk web presence. And if I expand this section, I can see why Stripe thinks that this user might be risky.

It looks like the merchant’s online presence is high risk because there are many consumer reports indicating that the merchant failed to ship goods and also that their storefront is currently entirely unavailable. Sounds pretty sketchy. Second, Stripe is flagging that there’s suspicious account activity, in particular that the account was created within… Sorry, the account submitted their application only a few seconds after the account was created, which suggests some automated bot going through onboarding. Second, Stripe is flagging that the owner’s email was observed by Stripe only a few seconds prior to the onboarding, which is suspicious because Stripe has actually seen most emails as either buyers or merchants in the past.

And last, there’s a yellow flag here on some unusual account data: URLs and product descriptions that seem to match fraudulent accounts that we’ve seen before. Okay, sounds pretty concerning. So what should I do from here? I have a few options for next steps. I can take the recommended action and reject the account entirely. I can place a reserve on the account to limit my exposure while I investigate. Or, I can send an identity check to the user to verify that they are who they say they are. I’m not the fraud expert at the company, so I’m just going to add a note for my team. And, “Super sketchy. Prob fraud.” And you can of course make these notes as formal or informal as you like. All right, we can go back to the slides.

So Radar for platforms helps you limit losses and fraud, but what about the other side of the equation? Optimizing your growth. Let’s talk about onboardings. A recent study from our platform partners program found that most platforms lose users between sign-up and the first thousand dollars of payments that they process. 10% of users take three days to hit that milestone—not bad. But almost 50% take 45 days to hit that milestone. To improve your conversion funnel, we’re building new metrics into the Stripe Dashboard under the compliance section. You’ll soon be able to analyze your entire onboarding funnel from start to first payout, track your conversion and drop-off rate, and unpack where and why users are dropping off. These updates are going to go out to all platforms using Stripe-hosted or embedded onboarding experiences. All right, now let’s turn to Managed Risk. Here, Stripe does the heavy lifting.

We monitor risk signals, execute interventions on your behalf, and cover losses from transaction or account fraud. Many platforms opt for this model to protect their bottom line without having to scale up their own risk team. Today, I’m really excited to announce that we’re making this experience even more seamless and customizable with API-based Managed Risk. This lets you retain complete control over your user experience while still offloading risk to Stripe. So you can use our new API to build a bespoke UI for onboarding, handle user login and verification, edit user information without taking them out of your app, and even send your own communications when an action is required from the user.

Over the past few years since we’ve offered Managed Risk, platforms like Xero, Salesforce, and Dubsado who use it have collectively averted more than $400 million in losses. Okay. So to bring it all back, programmatically blocking bad actors is a critical step in scaling up your platform. And you can now put the might of Stripe’s network behind your risk strategy, whether using Radar for platforms or using our Managed Risk offering.

All right, that’s a wrap on the most important ways that Stripe is building for platforms. We’re shipping components and turnkey experiences to help you build faster. We’re giving you more pricing controls and a new growth studio powered by Stripe’s data to enable you to monetize better. And we’re expanding the capabilities of the Agentic Commerce Suite, Radar, and Managed Risk, so you can scale confidently. 10 years ago, SaaS platforms embedding payments and finance were the exception, and now they’re really the playbook to build a retention and revenue flywheel, especially in the age of AI.

We’re here to make sure that your financial suite is the best offering in the market. And of course, the biggest input to our roadmap is all of you. So please keep telling us what you need to be the financial home for your users, and thank you so much for your partnership.