This week, we kicked off Stripe Sessions, our annual user conference. The keynote and product talks are available on demand now, and a series of additional talks and workshops will be available over the next two weeks.  

During Sessions, you’ll get a closer look at new features, product demos, upcoming launches, and more. We’ll also highlight some of the novel ways Stripe is used by global businesses of all sizes—from early startups, including those that have incorporated through Stripe Atlas, to the more than 50 category leaders who process over $1B on Stripe each year.

Since we last held Sessions more than a year ago, we’ve improved payments performance to help you boost revenue and cut costs; launched dozens of new markets and payment methods to support your global expansion; and introduced new products such as Stripe Tax, Identity, and Treasury, to enable you to manage and build new revenue streams. Here's a recap of what’s new:

Payments acceptance and optimizations

Maximize conversion and accept payments globally with Stripe Payments.

• More than 20 Checkout improvements—including support for 10+ new languages, dynamic tax rates, subscriptions, new payment methods, one click checkout with Link with Stripe, and dynamic CAPTCHA—help you easily accept payments with almost no additional code. Plus, Checkout load time is now more than 50% faster.
• A new version of Stripe Elements coming later this year will let you automatically enable many payment methods from around the world from a single integration.
• Payment Links let you sell a product or subscription by simply sharing a link to a payment page—no code required.
• Stripe’s React Native SDK is now in public beta to help you build delightful payment experiences in your native Android and iOS apps using React Native.
• Over the four-day period spanning Black Friday to Cyber Monday, we maintained 99.999% uptime — and we’ve continued to maintain five 9’s of reliability over the course of 2021.
• Stripe’s platform connects directly to major card networks to reduce latency and ensure better authorization rates for you. Cartes Bancaires is now broadly available in France, and we expanded support for JCB and China UnionPay to the US, Australia, Canada, and more. We also now support Discover in Canada and the UK with direct integrations.
• Afterpay and Klarna give customers the option to buy now, pay later, and drive over 20% incremental sales for businesses on Stripe.
• Stripe manages end-to-end requirements to directly debit a customer’s bank account. Pull funds from a customer’s account using Bacs Direct Debit in the UK, SEPA Direct Debit in Europe, BECS Direct Debit in Australia, or pre-authorized debits in Canada.
• We added support for Alipay, WeChat Pay, and GrabPay, some of the most popular mobile wallets in Asia, as well as Konbini.
• OXXO and Installments in Mexico, and Boleto Bancário in Brazil help you reach more customers in Latin America.
• Adaptive Acceptance optimizes authorization messages to maximize conversion. These machine learning improvements recovered more than $3.4B in payments for our users last year.
• New Dashboard features save you time, including revamped customer pages, a redesigned flow to manually create payments in the Dashboard, the ability to send receipts with one click, and more.

Global expansion

Scale globally and move money from customers anywhere in the world with Stripe.

• In addition to launching more than 10 new local payment methods in markets across the globe, businesses anywhere in the world can now accept seven European payment methods in minutes. There’s no foreign incorporation, no new bank accounts, and no application to get started. 
• We launched in six new European markets: Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Malta.
• We launched in the United Arab Emirates, a market that will grow by $10 billion in the next two years, to help businesses access the Middle East.
• We welcomed Paystack to make payments easier for African businesses and enable more global companies to enter the fast-growing region. Paystack already processes more than half of all online payments in Nigeria.
• We expanded to Brazil, and towards the end of the year, we’ll start reaching Indonesia, Thailand, and India, the world’s fifth largest economy.
• SCA authentication engine improvements help EU users meet authentication requirements while optimizing conversion. By dynamically selecting the optimal version of 3D Secure, Stripe drives up to 15% lift in authentication success depending on the issuing bank.
• We expanded availability of our extended product suite internationally: Instant Payouts in Canada, Singapore, and the UK, Issuing in over 20 European countries, cross-border payouts to 50 countries, and more ways to move money with Connect in more countries, including Canada, Australia, and Japan, and Terminal will be launching in more than five new markets this year.

Billing and revenue management

Unlock growth with subscriptions and revenue tools including Stripe Tax, Invoicing, Billing, and Sigma.

• Stripe Tax lets you calculate and collect sales tax, VAT, and GST in the US, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand with one line of code or the click of a button. The TaxJar team also joined Stripe to help make it even easier to handle sales tax.  
• More than 10 enhancements to Stripe Invoicing, including multi-currency support, mobile invoicing, and PDF attachments, help you save time and get paid faster.
• Stripe Billing improvements help you more easily manage subscriptions with a hosted customer portal, and provide more flexible billing logic with subscription schedules and sub-cent pricing, better analytics, and more.
• Soon you’ll be able to create quotes in the Dashboard or via our API, and automatically convert the quote to a subscription or invoice.
• Revenue Recognition helps you record revenue correctly and reduce manual processes and conflicting data. It will soon be available for all Stripe users and on all their revenue including non-Stripe payments.
• Sigma data now refreshes every 12 hours and will be refreshed every hour by the end of this year. We also shipped new Sigma schema docs, so you can more easily find the information you need.

Identity verification

Build trust online through identity verification with Stripe Identity.

Stripe Identity lets you programmatically confirm the identity of global users so you can prevent attacks from fraudsters while minimizing friction for legitimate customers. We help collect and verify the authenticity of global ID documents from 33 countries, using biometric verification to match the document holder with their ID, and validate SSN. Online businesses can now more easily increase trust and safety, minimize fraud, prevent account takeovers, streamline Know Your Customer, and more.

Payments for platforms and marketplaces

Embed payments and move money globally for your platform, marketplace, or social network with Stripe Connect.

• In the past year our platform partners have generated over $1B in incremental earnings from embedded financial services through Connect. We’re making this monetization opportunity available to more platforms through our Partner Program with expanded revenue share available to all qualifying platforms that achieve a $1M run rate.
• Platform controls for Standard accounts add more capabilities, including co-branded dashboard and onboarding experiences and the optional ability to manage a user’s payout schedule. 
• Multi-party Payment Links offer the simplicity of sharing a link to a payment page and distributing that payment between your business and merchants, all without writing any code. 
• A new onboarding and verification flow increases conversion with prefillable fields, mobile optimizations, and localization in more than 35 countries and 14 languages.
• US platforms can send cross-border payouts to recipients in their local currencies in 50 countries (with more coming this year).
• Automated 1099 tax reporting and filing helps platforms and marketplaces easily create, file, and deliver 1099 tax forms.

In-person payments

Unify online and in-person payments with Stripe Terminal.

• We announced Stripe Reader, our first Stripe-designed hardware product. It's an easy-to-use mobile card reader for fast, reliable in-person payments. It pairs with accessories for countertop and on-the-go use, and is Point to Point Encryption-ready. Stripe Reader will be available in the US later this year.
• Beginning this summer, we’ll be expanding availability of Terminal to several new markets, including the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore.
• We’re also offering new reader options in these markets to give you more hardware choices.

Fraud prevention 

Fight fraud with the power of the Stripe network with Stripe Radar.

• Radar machine-learning improvements helped reduce disputes for Radar customers by 26% in 2020 despite a boom in ecommerce.
• With Risk Insights, Radar for Fraud Teams now provides more insight into which fraud signals most influenced risk scoring on each payment, helping to improve your manual reviews.
• New insights in Radar for Fraud Teams help you better prevent fraud and see how well our machine learning is working for you. See estimated false positive rates, blocked transactions, and dispute trends with Radar Analytics.
• Disputes Win Likelihood helps you more effectively prioritize your dispute responses by using machine learning to estimate which disputes you have a higher likelihood of winning.
• We acquired Bouncer to accelerate new interventions, including card scanning verification, to help you prevent fraud without sacrificing conversion.

Embedded finance

Extend your business model with Stripe Treasury, Capital, and Issuing.

• Payout Card, a new Stripe Treasury and Stripe Issuing integrated solution, lets marketplaces pay drivers, delivery people, or contractors with a card and financial account, allowing workers to spend earnings within minutes.
• Stripe Treasury, our banking-as-a-service API, lets marketplaces and platforms enable their customers to hold funds, pay bills, earn yield, and manage cash flow.
• Stripe Issuing expanded to 20 new European countries, including France, Germany, Ireland, Spain, and the UK to help businesses instantly create their own cards.
• Platforms can now offer access to fast and flexible financing to help their customers grow their businesses with Stripe Capital for platforms.

Carbon removal

Contribute to carbon removal as you grow your business with Stripe Climate.

Stripe Climate makes it easy for businesses to automatically direct a fraction of their revenue to scale emerging carbon removal technologies. More than 2,000 companies have already contributed to carbon removal since Climate launched last year.

Check out Stripe Sessions or talk to our team to learn more about how these new products and features can help your business.