On January 17, Ford Motor Company signed up a five-year deal with the online payment processor, Stripe to bolster its auto e-commerce capabilities. Stripe will facilitate transactions for vehicle orders and reservations, handle financing options for the automaker’s commercial customers and route customer’s payments from the automakers’ website to the correct local Ford dealer.
Ford Motors plans to use Stripe’s technology to process digital payments in markets across Europe and North America. The partnership marks one of the biggest client wins for Stripe and forms part of Ford’s wider restructuring plan. Ford’s electrification and growth strategy plans guide the company to invest $30 billion by 2025. Moreover, the strategic decision is in line with most of the auto industry’s moves toward investing in technology that would provide the greatest chance of getting returns. Ford expects to begin rolling out Stripe’s technology in the second half of 2022, beginning in North America with plans to enable further rollouts in Europe later.
Marion Harris, the CEO of Ford’s financial services arm, Ford Motor Credit Company, stated: “As part of the Ford+ plan for growth and value creation, we are making strategic decisions about where to bring in providers with robust expertise and where to build the differentiated, always-on experiences our customers will value. Stripe has developed strong expertise in user experiences that will help provide easy intuitive and secure payment processes for our customers.”
Meanwhile, Mike Clayville, the Chief Revenue Officer at Stripe, also commented: “We’re thrilled to be the payments engine under the hood powering the next stage of Ford’s digital transformation. During the pandemic, people got comfortable paying online for groceries, health care, even home haircut advice from barbers. Now, they expect to be able to buy anything and everything online. Ford is making e-commerce possible, too, and scaling that strategy with Stripe’s help.”
Stripe Is Keen to Grow Its Business Network
The development by Ford Motor Company comes at a time when Stripe has been keen on embracing collaborations with various partners as a way of promoting its growth and expansion. In the year 2020, Stripe partnered with hundreds of large multinational banks to accelerate its enterprise business and to scale and adapt to the increased pace of online commerce during the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2021, the company embarked on increasing the size of its Dublin headquarters and its European operations to meet the increasing demand coming from such regions. In March last year, Stripe partnered with Allianz X, the digital investment unit of Allianz Group. The partnership saw Allianz X participate in Stripe’s latest funding round , which totaled $600 million. Stripe wanted to use the funding to support the expansion of its European operations and long-term plan for the continent.
