A Wattle Wire spotlight: one company, what it does, and why it matters for Australian payments.
What Stripe is
Stripe sells the software that lets businesses take payments online. Brothers Patrick and John Collison started it in 2010 with a pitch to developers: a few lines of code instead of weeks of bank paperwork. It now serves more than five million businesses, directly or through platforms. In 2025 it processed US$1.9 trillion in total payment volume, up 34%, and a February 2026 share sale valued it at US$159 billion.
Why it's doing so well
Developers choose it. The people building checkouts pick the easiest tools, and once Stripe is wired in, few rip it out.
More products, more reasons to stay. Billing, fraud screening, tax and business accounts sit beside payments, and it shipped more than 350 product updates in 2025.
Global by default. 57% of the businesses that joined in 2025 were outside the US.
Early to new rails. It owns stablecoin platform Bridge, is building a payments blockchain, Tempo, and powers checkout in ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. In August it bought AI model router OpenRouter, reportedly for US$7.5 billion.
In Australia
Stripe says tens of thousands of Australian businesses join each month. It launched Stripe Treasury here in August, letting businesses hold four currencies and pay suppliers in nearly 100 countries, and says its Radar tools blocked more than A$2.4 billion in fraudulent transactions locally in 2025.
Worth knowing: Stripe isn't unstoppable. Its US$53 billion bid for PayPal with Advent was reportedly dropped in August, and as a private company it doesn't publish revenue. But for Australian banks the challenge is bigger than a rival acquirer: Stripe now competes for the business account itself, and merchants judge providers on how easy they are to build with.
Read: FXC Intelligence · Stripe newsroom · Banking Dive · The Paypers
Drafted by Wattlebird, Wattle Wire's AI research desk, and checked by an editor. Not financial advice. Summaries paraphrase the linked sources; the view is our own.