Stripe partners with Salesforce; invests for high scale as enterprise customers quickly adapt to digital economy

Online payment forms a big chunk of the fintech market and some renowned companies are currently ruling the roster. While most of us are aware of big shot companies such as Adyen and PayPal, the San-Francisco-based Fintech Stripe seems to be doing much better than its more famous competitors. Stripe has bagged the top spot in the Forrester Wave report on Global Merchant Payments Providers, Q3 2020. In addition, it has also announced a new partnership with Salesforce. 

Stripe scores highest in Forrester’s new report

Forrester is one of the leading analyst firms, which recently released its Forrester Wave report on Global Merchant Payments Providers, Q3 2020. As per the report, Stripe is the best performing fintech in two categories, namely, strategy and current product offering. Stripe was closely followed by Adyen, which is also in the same ballpark in the ‘Leaders’ segment wherein classified companies exhibit a strong strategy along with notable current offerings. 

“Many of our enterprise customers are huge category leaders—each one is a global giant processing more than a billion dollars annually—and they’re going all in on Stripe to move quickly at immense scale,” comments Mike Clayville, Chief Revenue Officer at Stripe. 

Partnership with Salesforce

Ever since the pandemic, people are being wary of dealing in cash and have turned to contactless and online payment options. This in turn leads to a huge increase in online transactions, which need to be rapidly processed. To help retailers adapt to this newfound digital spending surge, Stripe has forged a new partnership with the CRM software company Salesforce. 

The partnership was announced alongside the launch of Digital 360, a new platform aiming at binding marketing, commerce and digital experience products for “driving digital transformation in the enterprise.” There’s a part of this new platform called the Salesforce Commerce Cloud, which offers Commerce Cloud Payments that will be powered by Stripe to enable brands launch commerce experiences with integrated payments capabilities. 

“Our partnership with Salesforce will enable enterprise businesses to quickly bring new online products and services to market with best-in-class payments capabilities already built-in to support their customers and boost their revenue. As the world’s leading CRM provider, Salesforce can bring Stripe’s payments capabilities to a huge audience of fast growing, ambitious enterprise businesses, whilst deepening relationships with their users,” Eileen O’Mara, Stripe’s Revenue and Growth Lead for EMEA, tells Silicon Canals. 

Talking about Stripe’s future plans with respect to the European market, O’Mara says, Europe is a very important market for Stripe and we have experienced rapid growth here in the past few years supporting users of all sizes.”

“Over the last 12 months in particular, we’ve seen a lot of Europe’s major heritage brands move to Stripe –  from supermarket chains like Waitrose, to financial services giants like AJ Bell. Now more than ever businesses across Europe are reliant on the internet to drive growth, and we are well placed to help them as they adapt,” she adds. 

Focus on large enterprises

As large enterprises are acclimatising to the new digital economy, Stripe seems to be accelerating its march into the enterprise segment this year. According to the company, enterprises such as Atlassian, Maersk and Mindbody have turned to Stripe recently to help power adaptation in the form of optimising their core business, entering new markets, and creating new revenue streams.

In addition to Stripe’s aggressive push towards big businesses, the company is also investing heavily to further enable high-scale operations and securely move hundreds of billions of dollars a year for the world’s largest and most complex companies. 

“In recent months, all around the world, we have seen a massive acceleration in the growth of the online economy – which means enterprise businesses are also having to accelerate their plans to adapt. Changes that may previously have taken large enterprises years to implement are now being enacted in weeks. We want all companies to be able to seize the wide range of growth opportunities that exist online,” says O’Mara. 

The recent appointments of Dhivya Suryadevara as Chief Financial Officer (from General Motors) and Mike Clayville as Chief Revenue Officer (from Amazon Web Services), upgrades to Stripe’s invoicing and subscription capabilities, and the launch of Stripe’s global direct acquiring platform are among the foundations Stripe has put in place to enable further scale over the coming years. 

Additionally, considering its new partnership with Salesforce, fresh hires rollout of new upgrades and launches, we asked O’Mara if the company is planning for an IPO. However, she confirms that currently there are no plans for Stripe’s IPO, at least not in the near future. 

Image Credits: Stripe