Stripe opens up shop in BeNeLux
As of Yesterday, Stripe offers its services to all online businesses in the BeNeLux. Herewith Stripe now has a presence in 14 countries worldwide after the US, UK, Scandinavia and France.
CEO and co-founder John Collison mentioned: "The Netherlands is an important market to us as most companies here have an outwards perspective. In other words; high export volumes and a high level of automation."
Stripe started with a demo how their product works, and not surprisingly the service features almost seamless iDEAL-support.
iDEAL integration
Customers pay a fixed fee per transaction of € 0,25 for credit card payments surplussed with between 1,4% en 2,9% over the total purchase amount. Payments through iDEAL cost € 0,45, Sepa purchases € 0,35.
What sets Stripe apart: API's
Being a payment services mainly, the Stripe’s USP is mainly their software. Or as they mention it on their website themselves:
"Developers first. We believe that payments is a problem rooted in code, not finance. … Because we eliminate needless complexity and extraneous details, you can get up and running with Stripe in just a couple of minutes."
In other words: because of easy API's you only need 5 minutes to get payments up and running. For startups, that work a lot with new technology tools that integrate with Stripe, a BeNeLux business can now easily expand its reach to do business across more countries than before. Especially because Stripe offers solutions to deal with (complicated) tax regulations.
Hidden Gem: industry best practices
Besides giving a very interesting perspective on how businesses operate, Stripe left us with something noteworthy. A hidden gem; their first handbook named "Increment"; an Industry Best Practice hardcopy on on-call and incident response.
The handbook opens clearly:
"While much is written about how to write code and deploy distributed systems, there's much less about how humans can work together more effectively to achieve goals faster. This stuff is complicated and it matters. Version control, code review, pager rotations, devops practices. Increment exists to provide practical and useful insight into what effective teams are doing so the rest of us can learn from them more quickly."
What follows is literally a well documented overview of best practices of stories by people that work at industry leaders such as Google, Amazon, Netflix and Spotify.
The most striking thing about Stripe : Vision
What struck me most however, wasn't the fact that they opened up shop in the BeNeLux for good, nor that Duco and the Stripe team are very approachable guys. It is Stripe's vision that you can read between the lines when they speak about their business. It is the fact that they are able to zoom out from their day-to-day activities and constantly realise that they are enabling growth for other businesses. And with that growth, good things come along naturally.
Want to know if others felt the same? The proof is in the picture below.
— MM —
