Stripe launches Stripe Verified partner program

Stripe
Chief Operating Officer Claire Hughes Johnson
Stripe

• $9 billion payments processing startup Stripe is
  launching a formal partner program. 
• Essentially, developers and outside companies can build
  products that integrate with Stripe, with a fancy “Works With
  Stripe” badge for their troubles. 
• Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson says that there’s big
  opportunity: Stripe makes $1 for every $1.61 that partners make
  with their integrated products, she says.
• For Stripe, the timing comes from the fact that the
  company is being pulled upmarket, serving larger customers like
  Facebook and Salesforce — and could use the help from
  partners.

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Bill Gates gets a lot of credit for his
very early insight that even a company like Microsoft can’t
go it alone — you need partners to build new products on top of
your own, so you can reach more customers. 

Now payments startup Stripe, last valued at $9 billion, is taking
a page from that playbook with the launch of its first-ever
official partner program. Under this Stripe Verified program,
outside products will be labeled with the official designation
“Works With Stripe.” 

In an interview, Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson
tells Business Insider that while the company has millions of
businesses relying on its technology, it’s being increasingly
“pulled upmarket,” she says: After years of primarily serving
startups and smaller businesses, Stripe is starting to snag
larger customers like Facebook and Salesforce.

Those larger customers have complex needs, though, and
Stripe isn’t necessarily equipped to meet all of them. This is
where the 200 or so Stripe Verified partners come
in. 

“I think this is an obvious next step for us,”
says Hughes Johnson.

It includes so-called platform partners like Squarespace and
Shopify, which both let you set up online storefronts and accept
payments via Stripe. The other kind of partner comes in the form
of extensions that let you import your payments data into
accounting tools like Xero, or into analytics tools like Segment
that help you crunch the numbers. 

While Stripe has long allowed developers to hook into its
services, this is the first time that it’s certifying that the
connections are secure and the integrations stable. The existing
base of integrations made it easier to get the “Works With
Stripe” program off the ground with so many partners at the jump,
says Hughes Johnson.

She says that the opportunity for those partners is
immense. By the company’s own calculations, a partner will make
$1.61 for every $1 that Stripe pulls in. 

“That’s only going to go up,” says Hughes Johnson.

Indeed, Stripe will co-sell some partner solutions, meaning
that it’ll offer select enterprise customers a mix of its own
services, and those of its partners. The partners get more
inroads to customers, and Stripe can better suit enterprise
client needs, says Hughes Johnson. 

Taking a huge step back, Hughes Johnson says that the
Stripe Verified program speaks to the company’s mission of
“raising the GDP of the internet,” as she put it.

Stripe allows businesses to take payments, which is
especially important in international markets where that’s easier
said than done. Giving those same businesses a set of
interconnected, cross-compatible tools to help them manage that
same business will accelerate their growth, says Hughes
Johnson. 

And while Stripe has launched plenty of tools of its own
beyond payments — the
Stripe Radar analytics tool, for instance, or most recently,

Stripe Issuing, which lets customers issue their own debit
cards — Hughes Johnson says that she’s not worried about
competing with partners. The internet economy is young enough,
she says, that there’s a lot of room for partners to dig into
their own niches without overlapping with each other or Stripe
itself.

“The opportunity is huge,” says Hughes Johnson.

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