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Stripe CEO: Global Payments Are Just Getting Started

This article is more than 9 years old.

Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison has had a lot of high-profile wins in the past few months. His three-year-old payments company is powering the "buy" button on Twitter, it's behind a similar "buy" button on Facebook, and it's the backbone of a majority of apps using Apple Pay.

But the deal he thinks is the coolest is also the one that got the least attention: Stripe's partnership with Alipay.

"When we first did it, a lot of people hadn't even heard of Alipay," Collison said Sunday at the Techonomy conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif. Alipay, an Alibaba affiliate, is the largest payments company in China and processes millions of transactions a day.

In a country where only a small part of the population uses credit cards but many use Alipay for everyday transactions, the partnership opened doors for Western sellers. "What we did for them is made it possible for any Stripe user to accept payments via Alipay," Collison said. "This is the first time a ot of these western businesses could transact with people in China. It was so crazy to me that this was still a problem to be solved in 2014."

But when Stripe told its partners about the Alipay arrangement, they weren't immediately impressed. When they were told they could reach an additional 1.3 billion potential customers, "They said, 'I'm not sure how important this is to us -- we don't have that much revenue coming from China,'" Collison said. "It's like ... exactly."

"Sometimes it's hard to describe the potential of something that doesn't exist yet," he said.

That's Stripe's strategy to distinguish itself in a crowded field of payments platforms. The company is pushing to reach countries where credit cards aren't as common as in the U.S., allowing Stripe customers to accept transactions from all around the world -- even if they haven't realized that these could be potential buyers.

"For a lot of time the Internet really was a North American phenomenon. Now, because of globalization, the Internet is becoming truly global at a rapid pace, but the infrastructure is lacking," Collison said. "Across the world, about 2 percent of all consumer spending takes place online. There's this mature veneer to e-commerce. But fifty times more is taking place in the offline world. Think through the consequences of that happening on a global scale."

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