Stripe's global ambitions

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Hello and welcome to Protocol | Fintech! This Tuesday: Stripe gets global cash, local banks find a fintech advocate and Robinhood doubles its recruiting.
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Investors put another $600 million in Stripe's coffers, valuing the developer-friendly payments company at $95 billion.
The sources of that funding all but spell out Stripe's expansion plans. There's Allianz of Munich, Baillie Gifford of Edinburgh, and Axa of Paris. Oh, and Ireland's National Treasury Management Agency. Stripe plans to hire 1,000 people in Dublin in the next five years.
Tomorrow, the world. It was less than a decade ago that Stripe began its global expansion, hanging a Canadian flag in its office on Second Street in San Francisco.
Stripe is stretching beyond payments. Part of the global push will mean bulking up banking, lending and other services.
A business that builds businesses. Stripe says its goal is to increase the "GDP of the internet." That means knocking down obstacles to creating and growing businesses.
The bottom line: Stripe wants to be the "AWS of money." Stripe doesn't want to just provide better or faster payments. It wants to provide the underlying internet infrastructure for finance globally. That will require planting many more flags, even as it overtakes rivals.
Greg Goldfarb, who is VP of Products and Commerce at GoDaddy, admires the resilience and ingenuity of small business owners. "It is amazing to see entrepreneurs figuring out the new context really quickly to adapt and survive." We sat down with Goldfarb to talk about the rise in ecommerce, the impact of COVID-19, the major trends emerging this year and more.
What are you most excited about in fintech?
Business digital banking is finally gaining the spotlight. Neobanks and fintechs have been drivers for change in consumer digital banking, but the business digital banking experience has mostly been an afterthought. Last year's Paycheck Protection Program loan distribution served as a valuable test of the relationships businesses have with their financial institutions.
What fintech trend are you most worried about?
The delocalization of banking. That is a dangerous trend for the consumer, for the community and for the overall system. There is a need now more than ever for community banks and credit unions to maintain their personalized services but do it in a way that is fast and innovative to meet the needs of their communities in an entirely digital-first way.
What in fintech do you think needs to be fixed?
I'm hopeful that we will see open banking regulations in the United States in the next few years. There are countless use cases when a third party needs access to your financial data. In Europe, open banking laws like PSD2 require financial institutions to share this type of data when an end user authorizes it. Notably, this data access is governed by a secure, standards-based scheme: OAuth 2.0. In the United States, this data access relies upon brittle and insecure means like screen scraping and unhashed password storage. This needs to change from a privacy, reliability and national security perspective.
Thanks for reading — see you Friday.
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