New 'Stripe' Payment Processing Startup Partners with Apple and Twitter
The relatively new payment processing startup 'Stripe' is off to a very successful start, as it has already developed partnerships with major companies like Apple, Twitter, Lyft, and Shopify. The founders of Stripe, 24-year old John Collison and his brother Patrick Collison (26), say that the company's goal is to make it as easy to move money around the world as it is to move information.
After already launching and selling one successful startup, the two siblings were looking for an idea for their next project when it struck them how antiquated mobile payment processing systems had become. In response they created a simple solution – Stripe.
Stripe works with merchants and online vendors to provide a user-friendly and fast backend service that drastically simplifies and speeds up in-app and web-based purchases. The best part about the new service is that users don't even have to leave the page they're on to make a payment, as is the case with many other online payment processors like PayPal.
To illustrate just how archaic online payments typically feel to the end user, the founders of Stripe compare online payment processing to purchasing an item in person:
When you're at a physical store trying to purchase an item all you have to do is pull out some cash or swipe a card and you're on your way. When you're trying to order an item online in most cases you're stuck entering in your card details for a little while. Analogically they compare the process to having to go to the bank to make a purchase and then go back to the store to pick up your purchase.
Faster Payments for Consumers, Faster Success for Stripe
It appears that while Stripe has been focused on creating faster ways for consumers to pay online, consumers and other tech companies have been been ushering Stripe into an overnight success. Only three years after being founded, the San Fransisco-based startup has more than 160 employees and has been valued at $1.75 billion.
Some of the sites and customers they've partnered with include Shopify and TaskRabbit, but more recently Apple and Twitter have partnered with Stripe, creating even more buzz around the relatively new payment processing solution. The reason why Stripe has become so successful so quick is because it makes it easy for developers to incorporate payment processing into their apps within a variety of design styles, while also giving the user a much simpler and quicker way to pay.
Partnering with Apple and Twitter and other Major Companies
Earlier this month when Apple announced its new Apple Pay payments platform, it also announced that Stripe would be one of the partners on that project. According to co-founder John Collison, Apple will be making it easy to collect financial data from the end user (i.e. - through the new card-scanning feature in iOS8), and then this data will be neatly and quickly presented to the merchant through Stripe. Apple Pay will also be partnering with MasterCard, Visa, American Express and 6 major U.S. banks.
Twitter has partnered with Stripe to introduce its upcoming “In-Tweet Purchase” feature, which will give users the ability to purchase items using “Buy” buttons that can be embedded within tweets. This new feature is expected to change the way Twitter is used and potentially establish it as more of an eCommerce-oriented social site.
The increasingly popular rideshare app Lyft is also powered by Stripe, giving passengers that use the app the ability to quickly pay for their fair using nothing more than a few swipes and taps on their smartphone. Likewise, Instacart has partnered with Stripe to make purchasing groceries online free of conventional point-of-sale transactions. With all of these high-profile partnerships, it appears that Stripe could be starting to play an important role in the $720 billion mobile commerce market.
