Last week, payment processor Stripe published its now yearly business update, which includes details about the company’s evolving strategy as well as an update on its yearly volume processed, which in 2023 passed $1tn for the first time.

The publication follows Stripe upping its valuation to $65bn, having seen it previously drop to $50bn in 2023 from a $95bn high two years before. It comes as the company is slowly gearing up to an IPO, which is currently expected for 2025 at the earliest. This is reflected in the increased length of Stripe’s letter, which has reached 12 pages, up from 10 in 2023 and 7 in 2022.

Passing the $1tn processed mark also means the company joins a select group of players in the space who process over $1tn a year, with Stripe only narrowly behind Adyen, around $500bn behind PayPal and just under half of Worldpay, which is the leading payments processor in terms of volume.

While light on other numbers, Stripe’s letter did provide a number of updates about the company’s ongoing development and future strategy:

• Stripe says it is cashflow positive and says it expects to continue to be in 2024, which it claims is critical to enabling it to invest for long-term growth. The ecommerce-led company is therefore framing its strategy around the internet’s growth in scale and economic reach over the next 10 years.
• The company highlighted ways that it is tackling cart abandonment – citing research that suggests around 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned – including multiple optimisations to its checkout suite, including additional localisation improvements.
• The company also added 50 additional payment methods in the last year, bringing the total it supports globally to over 100. This includes Cash App Pay in the US and Swish in Sweden. 
• It reports having more than 100 companies processing over $1bn per year with Stripe, although it provided the same metric in its 2022 letter, making it unclear how many such companies it has added over the last 12 months. 
• As the company’s strategy includes a strong focus on onboarding startups and then supporting their growth, Stripe dedicated a section of its letter to startup performance, reporting that those founded in 2022 were 60% more likely to start collecting revenue and 57% more likely to process over $1m in their first year than those founded in 2019 – a change the company attributed to a tighter operating environment.
• The company also provided an update on its Black Friday/Cyber Monday performance, where it saw $18.6bn over the four-day period – its largest volume for a single four-day period in its history.

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Lucy Ingham

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Lucy is Head of Content & Editor-in-Chief at FXC Intelligence, overseeing all content and taking deep dives into the trends and data driving changes in payments. Before joining FXC Intelligence, Lucy worked as a technology journalist and editor, interviewing CEOs and major names across enterprise technology, including fintech. She has an MSc in Development Anthropology from Durham University.