Amber @ Wildcard Research

The @stripe product keynote just finished! We announced a lot of new stuff. (We actually couldn't fit everything into the keynote.) Some highlights: • We've built and deployed the first general-purpose Payments Foundation Model. Trained on tens of billions of transactions and already leading to very large fraud reductions. • We announced Stablecoin Financial Accounts. Businesses in 101(!) more countries can now store stablecoin balances in Stripe and use our regular fiat money movement rails around the world. The magic of stablecoins comes when they're integrated with the rest of the financial ecosystem. I think it's the biggest international launch we'll ever do -- businesses from 151 countries can now use Stripe. • Stripe Profiles: your public identity on the Stripe network. Stripe Profiles will let you streamline invoicing and payments with other businesses on Stripe. (We’ll soon launch reservations for Stripe Profiles.) • Stripe Verified, a new service that will help you navigate global requirements for payment processing with personalized monitoring, enhanced protections, and expert assistance. • We're adding multicurrency support to Stripe accounts: instead of converting all balances to a single currency, we're going to make it easy to store, convert, and operate across different currencies. We want to make it possible to use Stripe as your financial home. • Stripe Orchestration: manage multiple payment processors directly within Stripe. • Support for many new payment methods. You can now access more than 125 global payment methods on Stripe, including stablecoins and real-time payment schemes like Pix and UPI. • We’ve upgraded the AI models built into Optimized Checkout Suite and now use more than 100 signals to personalize the checkout in real time. A/B tests indicate that Optimized Checkout Suite increases revenue by 11.9% on average. • Managed Payments: merchant of record is coming to Stripe! Enter new markets while we take care of global taxes, fraud prevention, dispute management, fulfillment, and more. • A new Connect dashboard, with vastly improved visibility into what's happening across your platform. • Radar for Connect: it’s now way easier to detect and manage fraud and compliance issues with subaccounts. • Networked onboarding for platforms: users no longer need to re-enter their details if they’ve onboarded before. • Smart Disputes: AI automatically responds to disputes for you. Early results show that companies win 13% more chargebacks. We also put skin in the game: we cover the fee if you lose. • Radar now supports ACH and SEPA. This reduces fraud rates by 20% and 42% respectively. • A bunch of usage-based billing improvements. It can now ingest up to 100,000 events every second. • Stripe Terminal can now be used with third-party hardware, starting with Verifone. • Klarna is coming to Link. • Authorization Boost. AI automatically updates cards and tokens, determines optimal transaction routing across networks, and determines if and how to retry failed payments (if we’re confident that the failure was ephemeral). • Radar risk scores are now available via the API. (I.e. they can become a feature for in-house fraud systems.) • Stripe Tax is now available in 102 countries (up from 57 last year), and we also now automate the entire tax lifecycle (monitoring, registration, collection, filing). • New FX Quotes API. • Payment method sharing: if you have multiple Stripe accounts, you can now share payment details across them, saving the need to have customers re-enter their details. • Stripe Issuing now supports consumer card programs. (Long-requested!) • Global Payouts: pay customers, contractors, and other third parties with just an email address. • Stripe Workflows: build, test, and execute multistep flows that orchestrate behavior across Stripe multiple products—using your data, Stripe APIs, and conditional logic. • Stripe Scripts: a new way to extend and customize the logic in Stripe Billing. This will soon expand to cover many parts of the Stripe platform. • Benchmarking: compare your performance to similar businesses on Stripe. • You can now import third-party data into Stripe Capital, which enables expanded eligibility for your customers. • A new Issuing rules engine: granular configurability over authorization decisions. • Global Issuing via stablecoins: a simple and cohesive way to administer global card programs. Ramp is using this to massively accelerate their global expansion. • Data in Sigma is now far faster (6 hour latency, down from 24 hours). That'll continue to get faster in the coming months. Similar data freshness improvements across other products. • You can now use Instant Payouts to withdraw funds from Stripe to debit cards in 32 countries. • The Dashboard AI agent: create products, process refunds, and generate payment links by just telling our little critter what to do. Whew! I’m not sure I even covered everything. A few of the above are years in the works and could have received launch events by themselves. I’m very proud of the team. So what are the common themes? • We’re rethinking and upgrading pretty much every part of the stack with AI. (Embedding/foundation models, agents, etc.) • Stablecoins are enabling unprecedented global access and expansion. • We’re making a lot of things deeply configurable that weren’t previously. (Scripts, Workflows, and more.) Ties to our goal of building truly programmable, global financial services.