The payments space is crowded. Stripe isn’t worried.
A look at the Spreedly Gateway Index, which tracks the speed and volume of payment processors, shows the bewildering array of options out there for digital merchants looking to accept money online. But increasingly Stripe is standing out from the crowd. It now operates in 18 countries, making payments simple for early stage startups and large corporations all over the internet.
Only 2% of global payments take place online, Stripe says, and to put it mildly, that number will change — and Stripe plans to be there as it does.
“We want to increase the GDP of the internet,” Andy Young, Stripe’s UK head, said in December.
When Balanced, which specialized in payments for peer-to-peer marketplace businesses, announced it was closing operations last week, it sent its 320 customers — where else? — to Stripe. 320 might not sound like a lot of customers, but this list included sites such as Reddit and Artsy. The average ticket size via Balanced topped $200, which is high for online payments.
Payments is the hottest space in FinTech, and Stripe is the hottest company in payments. It’s the company behind the companies doing the coolest stuff in mobile: Kickstarter, Salesforce, Fitbit, Lyft, Shopify, Foursquare, Twitter, Rackspace, and now Reddit. Stripe, which has raised $190 million of venture funding since its launch in 2010, makes payments easy for the coolest companies out there, and that’s pretty cool.