“In 2010, when Patrick Collison founded Stripe Inc. with his younger brother John, he thought the world was headed toward ever-increasing globalization, economic stability and international commerce. Now, based on the events of the last couple years, no one holds “so Panglossian a view,” said the 30-year-old chief executive officer. “There are more headwinds to global economic integration than there were any time in the past 20 years,” Collison said. “That’s going to make global expansion more difficult for businesses in general.””

“Cross River Bank, a fast-growing provider of banking services for financial technology companies, today announced that it has established a partnership with Stripe to help those in the marketplace economy – such as workers in ridesharing, food delivery, and other freelance occupations – by providing them with access to their earnings through push-to-card payments.”

“Tandem, the U.K. challenger bank, is gearing up to launch a new “Auto Savings” feature — a clever way to lower the barriers for Tandem  app users who want to save for a rainy day — and to power the feature the company is partnering with Stripe. The latter in itself isn’t necessarily huge news when you consider that Stripe  is morphing into a payments company in the broadest sense. However, it does come at a time when other U.K. bank upstarts are attempting to wean users off making Stripe-powered card payments to top up their accounts since fees can soon add up.”

““For us it was quite visceral: these products are not serving the needs of the customers, so let’s build something better,” John Collison argues. “In old-fashioned legacy companies it’s the CFO choosing the payments system. They think all systems are alike, so they just sort the bids from suppliers. But if you’re a developer building the next Kickstarter, or the next Lyft, and you have a two-person team, both of you writing relatively complex code and solving complex infrastructural problem, you need a simple payments API that – once installed – doesn’t keep changing.””

“On this episode of the Knowledge Project, I chat with Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of the leading online payment processing company, Stripe. If you’ve purchased anything online recently, there’s a good chance that Stripe facilitated the transaction.”

“The search by online-payments kingpins for avenues into physical-world stores reached a new milestone Thursday with the acquisition by Stripe Inc. of point-of-sale technologist Index Inc. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, according to an Index spokesperson, who added the company has no immediate comment on the deal. A Stripe spokesperson said the deal closed “late last week” but refused to comment beyond that.”