Stripe unveils new third-party app marketplace

Financial infrastructure company Stripe has launched a new app marketplace that will allow customers use third-party tools to simplify operations and customise the payments platform for their own use, with fellow Irish unicorn Intercom among the launch partners.

Using Stripe Apps businesses can combine fragmented workflows, automatically share contextual information across apps and keep record systems in sync. While customers use Stripe to process payments, they could have separate tools for refund confirmations and dealing with customer support tickets. Stripe Apps will allow many of these tools to work together in one place and can be built directly into Stripe.

The new features were announced at Stripe Sessions, the company's annual conference.

"It's like any operating system: core functionality needs to work perfectly out of the box. But the breadth of functionality of the platform is also really important having an app to solve every use case," said Stripe co-founder John Collison. "For years, our users have been asking us to allow the choice to interoperate with Stripe."

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Intercom joins major international names such as DocuSign, Dropbox, Mailchimp, Ramp and Xero in the first 50 launch apps in the marketplace. The apps will cover everything from accounting and customer relations management to marketing and e-signatures. More will be added over time and apps will also be available in different languages.

“With the Intercom app integrated into Stripe, our customers can investigate issues, answer payment queries, approve refunds, and more from the Stripe dashboard,” said Des Traynor, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Intercom. “They can do all this while still providing real-time, in-context support to customers via the Intercom messenger.”

Apps can be developed for customers’ own personal use, or published in the app marketplace for others to use.

"With Stripe Apps, businesses can customise Stripe with their SaaS [software as a service] tools to best serve their customers," said Bowen Pan, head of product for Stripe Apps."We're excited for this new chapter and can't wait to see the ingenuity of all the apps that developers will build in the months and years ahead."

Developers can already begin building apps and they will be available for users to install directly in the coming weeks.