Stripe took a step towards expanding the use of stablecoins in the mainstream financial system, expanding stablecoin-funded accounts to more than 100 new markets.
The move will allow its customers to hold funds and make payments internationally more easily, Stripe said.
The company unveiled a raft of product updates at Stripe Sessions in San Francisco, including new AI features that include an AI foundation model for payments and dispute management powered by artificial intelligence.
The company’s increased support of stablecoins follows its acquisition of stablecoin platform Bridge earlier this year. A stablecoin is a type of cryptocurrency that is pegged to the value of a currency, such as the US dollar, and can be faster and cheaper to move money internationally. Stripe’s stablecoin financial accounts will use initially use Bridge’s USDB and Circle’s USDC tokens, pegged to the US dollar, but there are plans to expand it further over time.
Bridge has also linked up with Visa to issue global cards linked to stablecoin wallets, allowing cardholders to spend the digital currency with merchants that only accept fiat currency payments, converting the funds for cardholders as they spend.
Stripe is also beefing up its AI capabilities, one of the “gale-force tailwinds” that chief executive Patrick Collison discussed in the opening keynote of Stripe Sessions. Trained on tens of billions of transactions, Stripe’s Payments Foundation Model will be deployed across Stripe’s payments suite. The company said its initial work on fighting car testing attacks showing an increase in detection rates by 64 per cent almost overnight.
Stripe has previously implemented AI across its business to support customers in areas such as fraud prevention and boosting authorisation rates. However, the company said this was the first AI foundational model that had been created specifically for payments.
Stripe’s Smart Disputes feature uses AI to help handle disputes for customers, cutting the time needed to help deal with cases and increasing the win rate of chargebacks by 13 per cent.
The latest announcements were part of more than 60 updates and enhancements to Stripe products that the company announced at its annual conference.
“We’re building programmable financial services, to make money as easy to manipulate and manage with code as data is,” said Will Gaybrick, Stripe’s president of product and business.
Businesses on Stripe will also be able to hold and manage balances in multiple currencies, initially dollars, euro and sterling, converting between currencies and creating virtual and physical cards for each of the currencies as needed. The new feature is intended to cut foreign exchange fees for multinational companies. The new feature will be available to businesses in the US and UK at first, with European customers of Stripe getting the facility later this year.
Stripe is also adding Klarna as an option on payment product Link in the coming months, and expanding Stripe Tax to more than 100 countries, almost double the previous 57 in which it was available.
