More than a decade ago, Stripe launched with a promise to make payments easy. We’ve kept that promise and expanded on it, as payments have increased in strategic importance. Today, all of the most important growth opportunities—from international expansion to launching new business models—depend on getting payments right.

In other words, payments have evolved from a cost center to a revenue driver, which you can’t afford not to take advantage of.

As payments have changed, the types of businesses Stripe supports have changed, too. Stripe was founded to power startups with fast, flexible financial infrastructure. As the online economy has become more encompassing and sophisticated, enterprises have come to want those same things. In 2023, we’ve had enterprises such as Hertz, Zara, BMW, Alaska Airlines, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Uber turn to Stripe as they’re redefining how large companies do business online.

Our primary focus at BMW is to create and provide the best premium customer experience for our owners. Stripe helps us offer BMW owners a secure and seamless payments experience across all channels.

These companies—and many more like them—come to Stripe for the same speed and reliability that startups have always prized. We process more than 500 million API requests per day and target five nines of reliability on an ongoing basis. We achieved that this Black Friday through Cyber Monday. It was the largest ever four-day period on Stripe, during which we processed more than $18.6 billion in transaction volume at a peak of 27,395 requests per second, while blocking more than 16.7 million fraudulent transactions with Stripe Radar.

But to take advantage of this speed and reliability, enterprises need Stripe to be compatible with their advanced requirements and with the complex systems they already have in place. In response, we’ve evolved. We’ve invested heavily in payment capabilities that serve enterprise businesses, including: improved payment optimizations, broader payment method coverage, flexible card acquiring features, streamlined account management for businesses with complex entity structures, native multiprocessor support, and faster payout timing.

It’s the same Stripe. Only now, we power more than 100 category leaders that each process more than $1 billion with us annually. Here are some of the capabilities that are helping to enable their success.

Tailor Stripe to your enterprise

Enterprises are complex organizations: they need to manage and report revenue across diverse business lines and subsidiaries, often have multiple payment processors for redundancy or regional coverage, and their payment needs are often vertical-specific (e.g., overcapture for restaurants to enable tipping or extended auth windows for hotels that span from check-in to checkout). This complexity poses a challenge when they need to add to their payment stack. Enterprises can either shop for disjointed third-party solutions (which often won’t integrate well with their existing systems) or spend a lot of money building in-house solutions (that may not scale to a wide variety of use cases).  

Stripe has always focused on building products around what users tell us they need, and we’ve recently made these integration challenges easier to solve by adding some key capabilities for enterprises:

• Streamlined multiaccount management. A centralized view in the Stripe Dashboard means enterprises can manage all lines of business or subsidiaries, search across multiple accounts, and download consolidated balance reports. Companies such as Atlassian are experiencing the benefits.

For us, unified reporting is nothing short of a game-changer. Because Atlassian operates across more than five Stripe accounts, adding our accounts to an organization has enabled us to significantly streamline our financial reporting. We can now download a single consolidated report, saving our teams tons of time. We love that Stripe collaborated closely with us to understand our business and deliver solutions that would make managing payments even easier across all our accounts.

• Multiprocessor capabilities. Our modular multiprocessor solution allows businesses to tokenize and store card data in Stripe’s centralized vault and route that data to other processors. This means businesses benefit across processors from Stripe’s PCI-compliant data collection and access to card account updater, which can help improve auth rates. Enterprises have full control over routing, and Stripe routes charge requests to the processors of their choice—all while being able to provide a consistent checkout experience using Stripe’s conversion-optimized payment UI. And multiprocessor support is a direction we’re taking in product development generally: we recently announced multiprocessor compatibility for Stripe Tax.
• Flexible card acquiring features. Enterprises can unlock vertical-specific needs and improve payment economics with card acquiring features such as multicapture, extended authorization windows, overcapture, and incremental authorizations. While these are stand-alone capabilities that help improve card payment flows, we’ve built them to be used in concert—providing businesses with new levels of flexibility that lead to a better customer experience.

Increase conversion and reduce costs 

Every year, businesses collectively miss out on hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue for avoidable reasons, such as basic errors in their checkout flows and false declines. Stripe assists in mitigating those losses and helping companies increase revenue by optimizing every step of the checkout process. With Stripe, Hargreaves Lansdown—the United Kingdom’s biggest investment platform—was able to reduce failed payments by £540 million. And Uber and Airbnb have lowered costs while offering their customers an accelerated checkout experience through Link.

Creating payments experiences that combine payments innovation, reduced friction, and cost savings is at the core of what we do. Stripe shares our commitment to reliability, customer centricity, and continued innovation—which is why they are a key partner.

There are specific conversion and cost optimizations that particularly matter to enterprises, and we address them with:

• Global card lifecycle management. Stripe is one of the industry’s largest processors for tokenized Visa and Mastercard transactions, and in 2023, we’ve expanded network token support to 46 new markets. Stripe supports Visa and Mastercard real-time account updater in all regions, and Visa recently announced Stripe as one of its first launch partners in Asia Pacific. Together, network tokens and real-time card account updater can lead to higher authorization rates by automatically updating card credentials. Businesses on Stripe have seen more than $1.5 billion in additional revenue over the past three months as a result. 
• Optimized authentication engine. Stripe provides a set of smart authentication capabilities that enables businesses to maximize profit by intelligently requesting available SCA exemptions. This optimizes for conversion, fraud mitigation, and cost reduction. In addition, Stripe supports:
  • Expanded data sharing via Mastercard to enable more issuer authorizations without 3D Secure friction.
  • Expanded Transaction Risk Analysis (TRA £440) exemptions for low-risk transactions in the UK.
  • Imported 3D Secure results to enable processing payments on Stripe that were authenticated via another party.
• The Optimized Checkout Suite. Businesses can gain, on average, an 11.9% increase in revenue through higher conversion rates by using our prebuilt payment UIs, dynamically surfaced payment methods, and Link—Stripe’s one-click checkout. Our suite includes unique tools such as: 
  • A/B testing that allows businesses to measure how adding new payment methods impacts conversion, average order volume, and cost—without having to schedule engineering or data science resources months in advance.
  • Automated dispute management across certain payment methods in addition to cards. Stripe offers dispute management for payment methods such as Affirm, Afterpay, Cash App, Klarna, PayPal, and more—all from the single Stripe Dashboard and API.

Unify online and in-store commerce

The line between online and in-person commerce has all but disappeared. Customers expect the same experience regardless of where they shop, and businesses need a complete view of their customers and revenue regardless of where a purchase takes place. 

British retailer River Island worked with Stripe to replace its legacy payment stack with a modern, unified commerce solution. Stripe processes 100% of River Island’s online sales and is supporting its in-store checkout as well—which is now about 30% faster with 1% higher conversion rates. 

We’re making it easier for enterprises to roll out unified commerce experiences with additional payment capabilities, including:

• More point-of-service and property management system integrations. Stripe streamlines in-person checkout experiences by integrating with POS providers for retailers such as Tulip, NewStore, and Teamwork Commerce, in addition to PMS providers for hospitality businesses, such as Oracle OPERA.
• Offline mode. Stripe Terminal allows businesses to collect payments on the go, even when the internet goes out. Payments are stored locally, and when the internet returns, the SDK automatically forwards them to Stripe.
• Stripe Reader S700. Stripe is committed to designing and manufacturing hardware that streamlines operations and provides better on-reader experiences. With Stripe Reader S700, businesses can use prebuilt elements to design a custom checkout experience for customer interactions—from signature capture to loyalty program signup—or they can run their own POS application on an all-in-one device.
• Accept contactless in-person payments without additional hardware. For businesses that don’t require traditional hardware, Stripe was the first payment provider to offer Tap to Pay on iPhone and Tap to Pay on Android, giving even the largest and most complex businesses the ability to accept contactless payments with compatible iPhone or Android devices. Alaska Airlines recently equipped more than 7,000 flight attendants with Tap to Pay on iPhone for in-flight food and beverage purchases.

Expand globally and move money seamlessly

The number of payment methods has expanded dramatically over the last decade. Businesses need to respond by offering customers fast, localized checkouts that surface the most relevant payment methods and present in local currencies—all while simultaneously balancing the complexities of multicurrency management, foreign exchange risk, and cost.

Sophisticated companies have turned to Stripe to support their global ambitions. Stripe helped Amazon expand into more countries quickly by lowering barriers to entry, and we’ve enabled expansion for Deliveroo and WooCommerce as well. In addition to being able to enter new or niche markets faster, Stripe’s extensive local acquiring and cross-border support helps enterprises optimize costs. Capabilities include:

• Access to more payment methods. Stripe handles complex eligibility logic, including customer location and transaction size, then presents the most relevant local payment methods so that businesses can expand more easily and reach new customers—even in markets where they don’t have a local entity.
• Local presentment. Stripe helps improve conversion by enabling businesses to present in local currencies, while also reducing FX risk by converting funds with Stripe’s latest exchange rates at the time of charge.
• Alternative currency payouts. Businesses can optimize multicurrency funds flows and reduce costs by holding funds in up to 18 supported currencies without having to re-convert funds or use third-party websites.
• T+1 payouts in markets where Stripe operates. Stripe’s T+1 payouts differ from other providers by not relying on settlement times. For businesses with T+1 payouts, funds typically settle directly into a business’s bank account just one day after the transaction is captured. This frees up funds to be used quickly wherever needed.

Building for the future of enterprise 

We’ve been adding features that make Stripe compatible with the complexity and advanced requirements of the world’s biggest companies. We’re now seeing our enterprise users move at startup speed as they spin up new business models, expand into new markets, and build innovative customer experiences. 

Building for enterprises is ongoing work, and we’re continuing to invest in the capabilities that all large businesses—not just those born on the internet—need to thrive in the online economy. This means providing more flexibility and control with capabilities such as multiprocessor and multiaccount management, and better customization for platforms and their connected accounts. We’re also prioritizing the needs of specific industries, increasing transparency through improved reporting and insights, and meeting evolving customer preferences with localized payments. 

To learn more about how Stripe is building for enterprise businesses, visit our enterprise hub, or get in touch.