Eddie Serrill, Business Lead for Stripe Capital — Using Future Performance to Unlock SMB Growth

Published in

Wharton FinTech

3 min readJan 24, 2022

In today’s episode, I’m joined by Eddie Serrill, business lead for Stripe Capital and site lead for New York’s Stripe office.

Eddie and I cover a range of topics, including:

Eddie’s Background:
After getting his MBA from the Wharton School, Eddie worked at TrialPay as the VP of Revenue Operations. After that, he joined Bond Street as Chief Operating Officer. When Eddie first joined Bond Street, the team only had a PowerPoint presentation and an idea. Eddie helped scale the team until their eventual acquisition by Goldman Sachs in 2017. Eddie highlighted 3 key lessons learned from his time at Bond Street that he believes are crucial for lending businesses to successfully grow:

1) Scale is key: Lending business models work best as loan volumes reach the billions

2) The business needs to be balanced: Eddie has seen many alternative lenders focus primarily on growth at the expense of accurate risk models

3) The importance of a moat: It is hard for lending businesses to build a wedge or a unique distribution model, having a line of sight into a long-term moat is especially important

Stripe’s Ability to Create Products for Online Businesses:
Stripe has created an incredible suite of products for online businesses that covers nearly the entire financial stack. When I asked Eddie what makes this possible — his answer was simple:

“It starts with a user first focus and the willingness to break things down from a first principle perspective. I think that truly is the advantage…Stripe Capital would not exist within Stripe if we hadn’t reached out to our users and heard that [Capital] is the biggest barrier to growth.”

Over 1/3rd of Stripe’s users stated that access to capital was their biggest barrier to growth, and Stripe Capital was created to address this need.

The Success and Impact of Stripe Capital:
Eddie and I discuss how Stripe Capital has been able to support small businesses, especially through the pandemic. Overall, companies that use Stripe Capital have seen a 114% increase in revenue over similar companies not on Stripe Capital. This effect is even larger for businesses processing less than $100K a year.

Eddie highlights two success stories in particular:

Evita Thomas, CEO of Chunkay, a Trinidadian Restaurant
Nick Peterson, owner of Tiny Wood Stove

See more information on the impact of Stripe Capital here!

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Eddie Serrill:
Eddie is the Business Lead for Stripe Capital and the site lead for Stripe’s New York office. Stripe is a technology company that’s building economic infrastructure for the internet. Businesses of every size — from new startups to public companies — use Stripe’s software to accept payments and manage their businesses online. Stripe Capital provides Stripe users with access to financing, and enables platform partners to offer financing to their customers with an end-to-end lending API. Prior to Stripe, Eddie served as the COO of Bond Street and the VP of Revenue & Operations at TrialPay. He holds a degree in Economics and Philosophy from Duke University and an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

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About the Author:
Anirudh Singh is a second-year MBA Candidate at The Wharton School, where he is part of the Wharton FinTech Podcast team. He has a passion for economic development, venture capital, financial services, and all things FinTech. Don’t hesitate to reach out with questions, comments, feedback, and opportunities at singhan@wharton.upenn.edu.

Eddie Serrill, Business Lead for Stripe Capital — Using Future Performance to Unlock SMB Growth

Written by Anirudh Singh