Stripe Treasury thread here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25289626" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25289626</a><p>This looks like a good article but we probably shouldn't have two on the front page at the same time.
Wow - I wonder if this is how Bezos felt when he said (paraphrasing) he feared the internet was taking off without him?<p>Stripe Capital is their iPhone moment -- they've learned much from the software payments market, setting up an 'import Financial Foundation,' and now can use their novel data stream to effectively transform business cash flow financing.<p>Capital will be a a beautiful take on an old way of financing (factoring accounts receivable), at the scale of big tech, and in immediate payback terms -- since CC's settle comparatively (to 1-3 day ach) 'instantly' in the US.<p>This combined with the data on sales will allow them to pick better winners and allocate capital -- the impacts of this will be mind boggling. I wish I could buy stock.
> Stripe is enabling standardized access to global banking capabilities via APIs...<p>The API is Stripe's core competency, and they've been excelling at it for a long time.<p>I think one thing that Stripe does very well is allow developers to focus on developing. Setting up a business relationship with financial institutions is cumbersome and the legal details can be daunting.<p>While their engineering reputation is high quality, I'm curious to know how much of Stripe's headcount is in lawyering and policy work.
For me, as a business owner, I am inundated with letters from companies offering capital. I understand that this is a platform play and could well succeed but for me feels like a very crowded market. Maybe worth it as a convenience thing?<p>I can imagine most Fintechs are working on similar at the moment. Curve, Monzo, Revolut, Starling are all going too need lending to profit in the future.<p>Maybe the success of this will be driven by the economic engine. Lets hope it doesn't stall.
I was happy to see that they added payouts as this is something I queried before.<p>However, it seems linked to Connect, which makes it very expensive at £2 per month per active account.<p>I realise that there are plenty of regulations that they take care of, but really what I want is an API to send money to an account or card and that's it.
Stripe is ideally placed for being an economic platform. They understand developers better than most of their peers. They know how to write and document APIs. They have traction - arguably the most important part of being a platform.<p>Of course current customers of Stripe like Shopify are already big enough that they could take a stab at empire building themselves. But probably they have no material incentive now as their core business is growing so fast and I am sure Stripe has given them great terms.
Stripe, like PayPal, is becoming too fundamental as a layer of our financial infrastructure. One issue I have with them is that they take an aggressive approach to censorship and deplatforming, encoding their political biases into their offerings instead of taking a hands-off pro-free-speech approach. There are many examples of them banning users or organizations who are not aligned with their progressive world view. Stripe is basically PayPal 2.0, and their censorship actions remind me of PayPal and the credit card processors blocking donations to WikiLeaks.
Can stripe 1st work on reducing their fees?<p>They're just like the incumbents. Only surrounded by more silicon valley sycophants.<p>Taking 2.6%+ of every merchant transaction is nuts.