Oh come on. I would rather integrate Stripe into a customers' system than any other EU payment provider (though Stripe's "Look how simple this is" changed somewhat once 3D-Secure became necessary for our customers), but they have not reshaped the economy or democratised payments.
I'd award that to PayPal and the work they did over a decade ago. Also see Braintree (not used), Square (not used) et al
Until Stripe came to Japan, there was really only one solution to accept USD or EUR there: PayPal. The local equivalents were all JPY only. But for Tomotcha, since we are targeting an audience outside of Japan, we really wanted USD and EUR. The day I heard that Stripe was coming to Japan I started to harass them every few weeks to know when it was going to be ready...
Conclusion: it did reshape things quite a bit on this side of the planet.
If you're non-American Stripe was indeed 'revolutionary' in a product/market sense. There literally were no good options before Stripe, even here in Canada. Braintree was okay but limited to the US (at least early on, idk now). The other options were absolutely awful in a technical and even often business sense.
But that doesn't mean it 'democratized' anything. If anything it centralized the market merely by being the only good option in a market run by "MBAs" which was in desperate need of real software/design talent.
Nothing wrong with greatest from pure market dominance by delivering real value to customers.
Besides Stripe apparently isn't purely free and open (ie, not holding strong values outside of the purely commercial marketplace) to everyone, when they are declined services to Gab.ai unless they stop 'serving adult content' which is lawyer speak to attack them for allowing unsavoury people to exercise free speech. As bad as some Gab users are I don't think it's the payment processors place to enforce some terms of service or speech policy on their customers. As long as Gab deletes illegal content (which they claim they do) then I dont see why they shouldnt be allowed to run a service with a legitimate free speech policy.
Besides Stripe apparently isn't purely free and open (ie, not holding strong values outside of the purely commercial marketplace) to everyone, when they are declined services to Gab.ai unless they stop 'serving adult content' which is lawyer speak to attack them for allowing unsavoury people to exercise free speech. As bad as some Gab users are I don't think it's the payment processors place to enforce some terms of service or speech policy on their customers. As long as Gab deletes illegal content (which they claim they do) then I dont see why they shouldnt be allowed to run a service with a legitimate free speech policy.
You can't really put this on stripe, a big part of how good their product is is that they hammered out contracts with everyone who provides debit/credit card services. Those some companies have been blocking payments to the sex industry for years, as well as other groups they consider unsavory (recall Visa blocked donations to wikileaks). The financial institutions involved did not give up that clout when they signed on with stripe.
> The untold story of Stripe, the secretive $20bn startup driving Apple, Amazon and Facebook
I then did a control-F to look for how Apple is involved, and it only appears two other times. Once in a discussion about a WiFi pineapple, and then as a tag at the bottom of the page.
Do Apple and Amazon really use stripe for their payments? I've certainly never noticed any stripe branding.
Almost all multi-nationals use multiple payment processors and within the same market will build in redundancy in case a processor goes down. My guess is Stripe handles some volume for the big guys but definitely not all.
"We can press a button to move 100% of our payment traffic over to an alternative" makes for a hell of a negotiating position for getting the best payment processing rates, too.
"I've certainly never noticed any stripe branding." That is the whole point, you are not suppose to know who is processing the credit cards for apple. Stripe provides a white label services while paypal's convoluted service is really in your face about who provides the 'service'.
Looped in with IP Infringement, regulated or illegal products and services
> Adult content and services Pornography and other obscene materials (including literature, imagery and other media); sites offering any sexually-related services such as prostitution, escorts, pay-per view, adult live chat features
> Products or services that are otherwise prohibited by our financial partners
Video game or virtual world credits Sale of in-game currency unless the merchant is the operator of the virtual world
I saw the title of the article and had to do a lookup - the word democratised; it's a terrible choice here. This makes it sounds like stripe somehow made crypto send and receive easy.
They've done nothing of the sort. I'd say they have actually increased the chokehold monopolization of the major CC issuers instead.
If they used their clout to change the game, great, but they haven't.
You made some API things easier for developers - congrats. You are like paypal from a decade ago, but with 2.0 docs, and modern code for developers - except that paypal is actually helping more people take payments that are in threatened groups these days, and stripe just goes along with the censorship upstream and makes it easier to deploy.
Even coinbase is doing more to "democratize and reshape the digital economy" (not that they are doing it as well I had hoped they and others could).
I agree, and my comment is not really to down stripe - I think they are great, and have recommended them to people that take paypal in the past. My comment is more about the title of the post boasting that they did something magical for payments around the world, when it's actually kind of the opposite in some ways.
Funny thing is that it may be because of stripe that paypal is allowing itself to be used at more sexual places on the web (could also be that Obama and Holder have left and the current has changed from that direction as well)
I get it that companies are in a tough spot against the credit card companies - even governments are. On top of that, some of the tough things about the CC rules are indeed because of various governments and their pressures. It's a touch nut to crack, even walmart had trouble battling just a few parts of the CC monstrosity.
I still have hope that some kind of p2p easy to use bit-pay-like system does indeed democratize and revolutionize the payments system - something like firechat that is unstoppable. I would just not call stripe that system.
Keep an eye on Apple, who has active, direct financial relationships with a billion+ consumers[1].
Services like Apple Pay, Apple Pay Cash, Apple Pay on the Web, and iPhone Upgrade Program are pieces of a larger (if relatively slow-moving) strategy.
[1] In early 2014 Apple boasted of having 800+ million iTunes accounts, most of which have one or more associated credit cards. In September 2014, Bono leaked that Apple had shared a figure of 885 million. https://9to5mac.com/2014/09/22/u2-bono-apple-itunes/
Apple has always and will still market themselves as "family-friendly", recently they announced that they will not produce any adult content for their original content lineup.[1]
I recognize that Stripe was maybe the first to create a modern JSON-based API for financial transactions. At least maybe the first of that kind that gained traction. But to say they "reshaped the digital economy"?
I would say reshaping the digital economy would definitely entail direct competition with the big players like Visa and MasterCard. Lower the ridiculous percentages that these corporations fleece merchants with and then maybe I'll think differently.
When they got to the part about how 402 payment required is an HTTP status code it made me start thinking about crypto currency.
My strong personal belief is that cryptocurrency is not just an experiment for a small percentage of nerds but will in fact become the normal mode of payment on the internet. When cryptocurrency payments become practical and popular that will start reducing Stripe's market share or whatever.
I am putting a lot of faith in the efforts to scale up Ethereum.
What about the 3rd founder? He got written out of the narrative early on, but he built the original platform and was bought out in the first few years.
Anytime someone uses the term 'democratizes such and such' in the context of Valley startup I have to chuckle.
But honestly - isn't Stripe just a really clean and useful set of API's for transactions? I mean, a 'developer first' mentality towards payment systems?
All the power to them, I've used them and like them ...
But can anyone tell me why this is revolutionary/democratizing?
Stripe were not the first to do away with merchant accounts. Before Stripe existed, I was with FastSpring - no merchant account required. And FastSpring wasn't the only option either.
What Stripe did do was offer lower fees and a great API, and I did switch to them and have never regretted it - but, democritising digital payments? Pfft!
A 'merchant account' can be had by anyone relatively quickly at almost any bank. It would only be a hurdle for the tiniest of 1-2 person operations and a minor one at that.
I think Stripe did a good job, but I don't think it's anything but a better-mousetrap here, and not one that's going to change anything fundamentally, architecturally etc.
AirBnB, Uber, Facebook, Twitter - for better or worse they really changed things. Even Dropbox lead a new kind of 'persona cloud storage' movement, which is a change. Stripe ... not so much.
"That mean't you had to be all in" if your business is not registered, you're not a business. Seriously, that's a small hurdle. I'll bet the long tail of unregistered business revenue from Stripe is very small, and likely overshadowed by just a few large enterprise accounts.
I will say that Stripe Connect was a game-changing product for some types of applications.
A firm I worked with did booking for sports camps. The tech was positive-- give the coaches neat rosters and record keeping, and let parents easily pay the camp fees with a credit card.
The original architecture was to let the individual programs plug in their preferred merchant processing account; assuming Authorize.net or the like by default, and they'd just add their API key during the onboarding process. We'd bill them our fees once a month and it would slot into their business accounting neatly.
Wrong. These guys weren't running grown-up businesses with documentation and full-scale merchant accounts. They were basically half a step above collecting Mrs. Crampknicker collecting $10 bills for field trip deposits from fourth graders. So it ended up that the booking site acted as the merchant, and treated the coaches as fulfillment providers. We'd end up having to cut them checks once a week for the net after our fees.
With Stripe Connect, we had them click a link in their user control panel, walk through a three-screen enrollment form on the Stripe side, and then they were getting a direct deposit as soon as payment cleared, without paper or manual intervention.
Yeah, you could pull together a bunch of seperate services before to get the same results, but Stripe Connect put it within the reach of a team with 1 1/2 developers.
If you can suggest a better title we can change it again. Better means: more accurate and neutral, preferably using representative language from the article.
I'd award that to PayPal and the work they did over a decade ago. Also see Braintree (not used), Square (not used) et al