Stripe’s Next Step in Moving Money Everywhere

From left, Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison. Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Stripe is not a flashy company, and that’s by design. Stripe exists to simplify the lives of app makers by making the world’s clunky financial infrastructure as easy to access as embedding a YouTube video. Instead of bureaucracy and mainframes, Stripe offers a few lines of code.

That efficiency, and the sharpness with which it’s been implemented, has made Stripe a darling of Silicon Valley. Prominent investors invest in it. Prominent startups use it. And today Stripe is launching a new service that, if precedent holds, will make these same people want to invest in it and use it even more.

The internet giants of the last generation are solely of the internet. The most interesting companies of the current generation are much more about what technology can do in the real world. Patrick Collison

The crux of the update is that Stripe will now let US and Canadian companies sign up workers for on-demand marketplaces across the globe. Think drivers for Lyft, cleaners for Homejoy, grocery couriers for Instacart. Stripe says that its new service, Stripe Connect, will let companies sign up workers in all 18 countries where Stripe operates, and it will handle the backend busywork to get them paid

“The internet giants of the last generation are solely of the internet,” Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison says. “The most interesting companies of the current generation are much more about what technology can do in the real world.”

Money Everywhere

Not to mention the whole world. App-based marketplaces for services like driving and delivery have exploded in size and value in part because once the basic software and operations are in place, the model becomes extremely portable. Once Uber was set up in San Francisco, it just started exporting itself to cities around the world. The new service launched by Stripe has the potential to accelerate that kind of expansion all the more quickly.

Stripe says Stripe Connect comes with a new degree of tweak-ability compared to earlier versions of Stripe. Developers will have control over the look and feel of payments in their apps, as well as where and how the money flows behind the scenes when someone pays or needs to be paid. This might not sound like a huge deal. But consider, for example, what taking an Uber or a Lyft would be like if you had to fill out your credit card information in the app every time. Would those apps have grown in popularity as quickly?

Moving information over the internet has become easy, but moving money not so much, even today. You can send an email almost anywhere in the world online, but not a dollar. Many different strategies are on the rise to change this, from Bitcoin to Dwolla to Stripe. They all still have a long way to go before the internet becomes the main way money moves. But eventually it will be.