Payments infrastructure company Stripe has added card issuing services directly to businesses in its offerings for its United States-based clients.
Announced on Thursday, the payments company will also directly connect to Visa, Mastercard, and four other major credit card networks and has added some “revenue optimization” features to make its transaction flagging algorithm more efficient.
The San Francisco-based company has brought the three major updates when demand for online transactions is skyrocketing all around the world. The company also believes that direct integration of card networks will significantly reduce network latency.
Stripe is a major payment infrastructure provider on many platforms including Shopify, Wayfair, Peloton, Zoom, and Instacart. According to the company, it handles over 250 million API requests a day.
“As businesses around the world respond to the new normal, they’re rethinking how they engage with customers more than ever,” Mark Nelson, VP of billing platform at Twilio, said in a statement.
“It’s critical that our payments infrastructure is highly reliable as we elastically scale in response to customer demand. We look forward to continued partnership with Stripe as Twilio powers new forms of customer engagement around the world.”
Capturing the emerging markets
The scaling efforts came following Stripe’s raising of $600 million last week, with a valuation of $36 billion.
After expanding into 37 countries, Stripe is now targeting the emerging economies including Latin America and Southeast Asia. Last year, the platform entered Malaysia and added preview access for India and Brazil.
“Stripe Issuing is a big step forward, not just for the millions of businesses running on Stripe, but for credit cards as a fundamental technology,” Alex Rampell, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said.
“Businesses can now use an API to create and issue cards exactly when and where they need them, and they can do it in a few clicks, not a few months. As investors, we’re excited by all the potential new companies and business models that will emerge as a result.”
