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Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

(www.bloomberg.com)
563 points jonknee | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.019s | source
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Firebrand ◴[] No.18081755[source]
So maybe I don’t understand because I’m a dumb-dumb lay person, but what does Stripe do differently from all the other payment processors that has given its rise and hype.

Is Stripe popular because its developer friendly? What makes it better than Apple Pay, PayPal, and Square? Normally, when I shop online, I’m usually given an option to type my credit card info or use my PayPal account. Where does Stripe fit into all of this?

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rubyfan ◴[] No.18081853[source]
The little box you type your credit card in is a huge pain in the ass for companies larger and small due to some compliance requirements from financial institutions called PCI. I can’t understate the ass pain, system complexity, legal review, etc etc that this can bring. Doesn’t matter if you are big or small, it’s painful and can be costly. Big companies can pay to handle that, smaller companies can’t and have relied on historically clunky solutions to take payments.

Stripe can make that little box you type your credit card painless, seamless and highly accessible for small and large companies. They are generally delivering a high quality experience throughout their process and many of their staff are generally awesome.

Full disclosure, I work at a big company and we use Stripe. I used to work at startups in the early 2000s and handled payment solutions. The world is better with Stripe.

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1. YPCrumble ◴[] No.18081958[source]
You didn’t answer the question. What makes stripe different from Square?
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2. rubyfan ◴[] No.18098806[source]
Square is focused on in person card transactions whereas Stripe is focused primarily on online transactions and supports multiple types of payment method (CC, ACH, ApplePay, Bitcoin, etc). Stripe also handles outgoing payments (marketplace, top-ups, etc) and is just now getting into in person transactions.