Stripe is diversifying beyond payments 💳; The Amazon of LatAm is growing its FinTech biz on steroids 🤯; More FinTechs are buying other FinTechs 👀

FinTech is Eating the World, 5 May

Hey Everyone,

Happy Weekend! We’re finishing the week on Saturday but boy it’s hot!🔥 We’re going to look at Stripe that’s diversifying beyond payments (+ lots of bonus reads & deep dives), the Amazon of LatAm which is growing its FinTech biz on steroids (& how the real Amazon Bank is being built in LatAm from the ground up), and more FinTechs that are buying other FinTechs (let the great consolidation begin!). Let’s jump straight into the hot stuff 🌶

Stripe is diversifying beyond payments 💳

The news 🗞 With rapidly rising competition and a hit to its valuation, FinTech behemoth Stripe has made several moves in recent months to become a more valuable partner for small and enterprise businesses. 

Let’s take a look at them.

More on this 👉 Stripe in late April launched a revenue and finance automation suite, bringing together several products that handle recurring revenue, accounting, analytics, and money management.

Also, Stripe has added individual products, including a tax application programming interface, which manages sales taxes for transactions on and off Stripe; it also updated its billing and revenue reporting tools to streamline processing. 

Earlier this week, the FinTech giant launched a customizable Android-based smart reader to help businesses unify their online and in-person payment experiences. Stripe Reader S700 enables businesses to accept payments and leverage pre-built elements for customer details collection, such as signatures and email addresses, or to run custom apps directly on the device.

During the same week, Stripe also expanded its strategic payments partnership with Uber UBER 0.00%↑ across the United States, Australia, and Japan. Uber customers now have the option to easily pay with their bank accounts.

Also: Stripe is moving into Adyen’s territory 👀

On top of that, we must remember that since the start of 2023, Stripe has expanded coverage of softPOS, or the use of a smartphone to accept payments without add-on hardware, to nearly all mobile devices.

ICYMI: Stripe expands its reach with Tap to Pay for Android 🌍 [+ lots of bonus reads]

Stripe is also looking for use cases for advanced artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT, with customer engagement being one early focus.

ICYMI: Stripe’s building the payments foundation for tomorrow’s AI Economy 💳

✈️ THE TAKEAWAY

What this means? 🤔 In short, Stripe is diversifying its revenue streams and introducing new features so it would be a much more valuable partner for both small and enterprise businesses. On top of that, the FinTech giant is also preparing for a future where payments are less profitable. This is inevitable as advancing payment technology and growing competition will lead to lower margins. We can already see this happening with the like of Visa and Mastercard. Although payments is still their core business, the card network giants are now offering security, consulting, and open-banking tools. That’s the only way to stay relevant.

Bonus: Stripe’s slowing growth suggests a harsher reality for all payment firms 📉 [a deep dive with a lot of bonus reads]