(upbeat music)
Hi everybody, I'm Wisam and I'm here
with the Revenue and Finance
Automation product team
to share our latest product updates
across the suite.
So in this morning's keynote,
you heard updates across the three pillars
of Stripe's product portfolio.
First, payments.
Payments is about optimizing
the payments experience
for every customer anywhere in the world.
Second, embedded payments and finance.
Embedded payments and finance
is about helping extend
your platform offering
beyond core payments.
Think of things like banking-as-a-service.
And finally, my favorite,
Revenue and Finance Automation,
which helps you monetize in new ways
and in more markets.
Now this session is about
what's to come in the future
for Revenue and Finance Automation.
Now, typically when we talk to you
about our roadmap,
it's in a small one-on-one setting.
So believe it or not,
this is actually the first time
that we've done this
with such a huge group,
and I know that many of you had to choose
between your roadmap session
that you're attending.
So thank you for attending
the RFA session.
But you know the caveats of a roadmap.
It's possible that some of the things
that we're talking about are going to change,
but please take this as a best sneak peek
that we have into the future.
So, for folks who don't know
what the Revenue and Finance
Automation Suite is,
you can think of it as a set of products
that helps you orchestrate
the revenue lifecycle,
all the way from sending an invoice,
managing subscription billing,
ensuring tax compliance,
revenue reporting,
and revenue recognition.
And 300,000 customers use the RFA Suite
to manage and grow revenue.
As you heard in the keynote this morning,
we're on track to pass $500 million
of annual recurring revenue this year,
and it is a huge focus area for Stripe.
So ultimately what we're shipping
is designed to solve
the points of friction
across the revenue lifecycle,
starting with sending an invoice
all the way to closing your books
at the end of the month.
What we want to do
is to enable you to move at startup speed
while building
on enterprise grade infrastructure.
So how are we raising the bar to grow
and speed up revenue processes?
From the conversations
that we have with our users,
we hear three common asks.
First, our users want billing systems
that help them grow,
and that billing system
should be configurable.
Second, our users consistently tell us
that they want tax compliance
that supports agility.
What this means is that they want to go
and launch into new sales channels,
ship new business models,
and go into new markets
in an agile and quick way.
Finally, they want to close
their books faster
without manual processes
and get actionable insights.
So over the next 20 minutes,
we're going to share what to expect
across these three areas
this year and beyond.
So let's start
with how we help businesses grow faster
with Stripe Billing.
I'd like to turn it over to Shankar,
the product lead
for the Stripe Billing platform.
(audience applauding)
(upbeat music)
Thank you, Wisam.
As you operationalize your business,
there are two things that stand out.
The first
is that there are so many small things
that you have to take care of.
Imagine you have a simple business model,
perhaps a monthly subscription plan.
You'll then want to add annual
subscription options,
and then
you'll want to allow your customers
to switch from the monthly plan
to the annual plan at any time,
even the middle of a billing cycle.
And that means
you have to support prorating changes.
And then your marketing team
might want to offer discounts,
but only for annual subscribers.
And then you might want to offer
a free trial period,
but someone might come and tell you
that for customers in certain countries,
you have to send a reminder email
a few days before the trial ends.
As you can see,
even for seemingly
the simplest business propositions
there are so many things
that you have to take care of.
And don't even get me started
on complex sales contracts,
I can run out of time.
The second thing that stands out
is that as your business grows,
it's inevitable
that you'll want to customize
your billing system to meet the needs
of your specific business.
For example, you'll want to customize
how invoices are endured
and presented to your customers,
or when to grant and revoke
feature access,
or what specific operational
workflow to follow
when a high value invoice goes overdue,
or what steps to take
when subscription payments fail.
And I can keep going on and on.
We hear these stories
a lot in our conversations with you.
Businesses often choose a billing system
based on their current set of needs.
And you know,
we've all been there, we understand.
So many things to do,
you're just happy to at least
have a system
that does what you want today.
But 40% of businesses have lost deals
because of inflexible billing systems
and this percentage is higher
for larger businesses.
That's why as we build Stripe Billing,
these are the same two things
that we obsess about.
First, we focus on providing
more capabilities
for you out of the box,
so you don't have to worry about
so many small things.
And second,
we focus on making Stripe Billing
not only fully configurable,
but easy to do so.
So we'll talk about both of these things.
First, let's talk about
what new capabilities
we have out of the box.
83% of you said
that offering the right pricing model
is one of the most important factors
that affects your top line growth.
It's reasonable.
You want a billing system
that will support you
as you launch new products,
or new pricing strategies,
or expand to new geographies.
Today we announced
new capabilities for usage-based billing,
which has become a popular business model
over the past couple of years.
Quick show of hands in this room.
How many of you work in a business
that already does usage-based billing?
Quite a few.
You might have heard
in the keynote already,
but 80% of SaaS companies
either already have usage-based billing,
or are actively considering it.
With Stripe Billing,
you can now use the concept of meters
to stream usage events directly to Stripe
and you can rely on Stripe
to do the heavy lifting
of usage aggregation,
rating, and reporting.
In addition, how you report usage
is now fully decoupled
from how that usage is priced,
which means without needing to change
your usage reporting mechanisms,
you can more easily experiment
with new packaging and pricing models.
And crucially,
all of this usage aggregation
and reporting happens in near real time.
You can use these capabilities today.
But that's not all.
We have a few more capabilities
we're providing to you out of the box.
These are just a few examples.
Prebilling will enable
you to charge for your customers
in advance of starting a subscription,
or bill for multiple
future subscription cycles right now.
Another example is entitlements,
which will make it easy for you
to keep track of which customer
has access to what features,
even as you make changes
to your packaging and pricing models.
And later this year we'll also add support
for popular pricing models
such as credit burn downs.
Once again, these are just a few examples
of what we are doing to provide
out of the box.
Now let's move to the second thing,
which is making Stripe Billing
fully configurable
to meet your specific business needs,
while being easy to do so.
As your business grows,
you typically have workflows
that get more complex,
and we've heard from you many times
that you're looking for more mechanisms
to automate these billing tasks,
ideally without having to write any code.
With Stripe Billing,
you can now create automations
where you specify triggers,
conditions, and actions.
This effectively lets you create
workflows of the type,
“if this, then that.”
For example, if a subscription payment
above $1000 fails,
then you want a particular
member in your team
to be notified, and maybe a few days later
for the subscription to be canceled.
Or if you acquire a customer
via your sales team
identified by some customer metadata,
then you want a specific invoice
template to be used
for all of their subsequent invoices
automatically,
and best of all,
within the Stripe Dashboard.
This year we launched automations
for your recovery and retention workflows,
which makes it easy for you
to reduce involuntary churn.
And as I mentioned, best of all,
you can do this within the Dashboard.
Now, once you've implemented
these workflows,
you can also view the effectiveness
of all of these recovery strategies,
also within the Stripe Dashboard.
You can keep track of
your payment failure rate,
your recovery rate,
what retry mechanisms are working better,
and also track your top customers at risk.
These features,
along with our suite
of revenue optimization tools,
have enabled Stripe Billing users
to recover 58%
of failed payments last year.
That translated to a revenue impact
of $3.4 billion for these businesses.
You can use automations
with Stripe Billing today,
and we are continuously investing
in a variety of triggers and actions
so that you can model
your operational workflow
specific to your business
directly within Stripe
and have that be automated.
All right, but just having Stripe Billing
being fully configurable isn't enough.
After all, we know that billing systems
don't live in a vacuum.
It's also important for Stripe Billing
to be easily integrated with
the ecosystem of applications
and other systems that we use.
While there are many ways
that Stripe Billing helps,
there are two updates that our users
are particularly excited about.
The first is that later this year,
you can use Stripe Billing
with any payment processor.
Previously,
if you wanted to use Stripe Billing,
it was also best for you
to use Stripe Payments.
After all,
Stripe Billing and Stripe Payments
work seamlessly well together,
but for a variety of reasons,
many of our users want to more immediately
switch their billing systems
and not have to worry about payments.
With this update later in the year,
you can harness
all the benefits of Stripe Billing
without having to go through
the technical costs
of switching your payment processors also
at the same time.
The second is that we're investing
in more integrations
into the ecosystem of applications
that you use.
For example,
you can use the Salesforce CPQ Connector
for Stripe Billing
to seamlessly synchronize
your sales contracts
from Salesforce to Stripe
and have them be built appropriately.
Even if you use a more complex
Salesforce setup,
you can use our universal
Salesforce Connector, for example,
or you can use
the more than 150 Stripe apps
in the Stripe App Marketplace.
For example,
one of the apps will automatically
take the invoices that you
finalize on Stripe Billing
and upload them to relevant
government jurisdictions
across the world as e-invoices.
And I can keep going on.
To summarize all of this,
I'll go back to the two things
that I started with.
Our focus is on giving you
more capabilities out of the box
and making Stripe Billing
fully configurable
to meet your specific business needs
while being easy to do so.
We do this so that you can focus
on growing your business
and as you grow your business,
you also have to worry about
what might surprisingly
be a favorite topic among many of us,
taxes.
So for that,
I'll invite Kathy to the stage.
(audience applauding)
(upbeat music)
As your business grows,
staying compliant with tax
can be enormously challenging
and expensive.
Sales tax and indirect tax rates vary
based on what you sell, where you sell it,
and where your customer is located.
They can change frequently
and can differ even
based on which city block
your customer is located on.
For example, look at all the tax rates
that apply just right here
on this rooftop accuracy
at Moscone Center of San Francisco.
And not only does your business
need to calculate and collect tax,
but the business also
needs to register, file,
and remit payments on time
so that you avoid penalties and fines
that can eat into your margin.
Compliance with tax
isn't just a back-office thing
to think about later.
It can be a rate limiter on your growth.
81% of businesses on Stripe
have told us
that they expect to increase
international sales
over the next five years.
I love working with Stripe businesses
because y'all are so ambitious,
but what you've told us
is that thinking about tax compliance
is a major reason
why growth goes more slowly
than you would like it to.
And so we are investing
to help you all expand
into new markets
without having to worry about tax.
Last year we expanded support
across South America and Southeast Asia,
and this year we're adding support
for seven more countries
across the Middle East,
Africa, and Central Asia.
This means we cover virtually
all of Stripe Payments.
96% of Stripe's payment volume
is now in countries
that Stripe Tax supports,
but we know we're not done yet,
and so we have even more planned
for later this year.
You've also told us that
while calculating tax rates
is the most burdensome part of tax,
the operational cost really comes
in registrations and filing,
dealing with each individual
tax jurisdiction country state.
And so we want to solve this for you.
Later this year,
you'll be able to have Stripe
take care of this previously
really time-consuming,
mind-numbing task:
doing end-to-end sales tax registration
and filing on your behalf
in select US states.
You can stay focused on your business
and let Stripe handle
the complexity for you.
For businesses outside of the US,
we're making it easier to file VAT returns
directly from the Stripe Dashboard
with new apps
from our global filing partners
like SimplyVAT and Taxually.
For SaaS platforms in the audience,
this next update is for you.
You've told us
that you've also heard this pain
from your users who want you to
make tax compliance
easier for them.
And not only can you offer features
of tax compliance
to your users,
but you can build
a new revenue stream for your business.
Last year we launched Stripe Tax support
for SaaS platforms,
allowing platforms like Kajabi and Keap
to offer easy tax compliance solutions
to businesses that run on them.
And this year we're providing a new way
to integrate tax features
into your own platform's dashboard
with embedded components,
starting with tax registrations
and settings.
Everything within this box,
Stripe Tax will build for you
so that you can put it
directly into your platform experience
without any up-front setup costs
or any ongoing development maintenance.
And you can also customize it
to what you want to show users.
Finally, tax compliance
isn't just limited to Stripe Payments.
Many of you have revenue
from multiple channels
which makes it hard for you to, one,
make sure you're calculating
tax accurately
and consistently across
all of your payments,
and also to aggregate all the information
so that you can report on it
and file accurately.
And so we want to make it easy for you
to centralize your tax data
all in one place.
This means
that you'll be able to import data
from different payment processors
and platforms,
access your data and aggregate them
in Sigma and Data pipeline,
and use connectors, no-code connectors,
to make it easy to calculate tax
across commerce platforms
like WooCommerce and Adobe Commerce.
This will improve your business's accuracy
and data accessibility
and make tax compliance easier
across all of your payments,
not just Stripe.
Now we've covered how we help you
in billing and tax.
Next I'd like to invite up Naz,
our head of solutions architecture,
to talk through revenue recognition
and reporting.
(audience applauding) (upbeat music)
All right,
I'm here to tell Shankar and Kathy
that this is not enough.
It is not enough
for Stripe to offer billing solutions
to help you adapt your business
to the new pricing models.
And it's not enough to give you tax
to help you expand globally.
You told us that
changes to your revenue process
were stretching and breaking
your downstream finance systems.
So we built Stripe Revenue Recognition
to help you automate
your revenue accounting
and seamlessly account
for even the most complex scenarios,
like prorations, disputes,
mid-cycle upgrades.
But we want to do more.
We want to do more
to modernize your tools for accounting.
This year, we are adding
advanced account mapping
to make it simpler for you
to map your chart of accounts
to your downstream general ledger systems.
This seemingly small change
has already helped customers
like Morningstar save hours of manual time
that they used to spend
mapping their revenue recognition reports
to the downstream general ledger systems,
making it faster for them
to close their books
at the end of the month
on an ongoing basis.
And now you can bring
all of your revenue data together
on Stripe Revenue Recognition,
including your mobile app sales.
Stripe Connectors for use
with Apple App Store
and Google Play Store are now
available today.
Stripe data can be incredibly powerful,
and many of you want to do more
with your data.
You want to dig in,
you want to understand it,
you want to see where to invest
for growth.
We're excited that you can now
use the power of AI.
Yes, the power of AI on your Stripe data.
Today we announced that
Stripe's Sigma Assistant
is available for everyone.
Sigma Assistant lets you query
your Stripe data
without the use of SQL
in natural language.
So essentially what we are doing
is we are putting the power of AI
in the hands of everyone
in your organization,
no matter their technical ability.
So your operations team can now understand
their churn trends
and their dispute trends.
Your finance teams can pinpoint
the unpaid invoices.
And your product teams
can understand where their highest
and top customers live,
and their lifetime value.
You can now do so much more
with your Stripe data
with AI-powered Sigma Assistant.
Back to you, Wisam.
All right, thank you Naz.
So, that was a ton
of awesome announcements.
So the thing that I want to leave you with
is that everything that we build
starts with you.
Our roadmap is really all about listening
to our users' needs.
So, thank you for continuing
to give us feedback.
RFA's all about reducing friction,
maximizing agility,
and helping you grow revenue.
So I'd like to go to Q&A now,
and if I could invite the panel
back to the stage
while I get my trustee iPad out
to see all the wonderful questions
that came in.
We are loading.
All right, Naz,
I have the first question that came in.
I think you're probably the best person
equipped to answer it.
Awesome. Let's hear it.
“What are the integrations
that you're planning
for RFA products and other systems
like ERPs and CRMs?”
It is a favorite topic of mine.
So we understand that Stripe Billing
and Stripe RFA Suite needs to exist
in an ecosystem
around your revenue processes.
So obviously the CRM, ERP,
all of that is part of that.
It's an important part of our strategy
and we are investing a lot there.
So today you would have heard
that we announced
our Salesforce Connector,
NetSuite Connector.
We also had the Apple App Store
and Google Play Store
that I spoke about earlier today.
And there's also a lot of
updates around our raw data
through Sigma Assistant, for example.
So across all of that,
a lot of good work has already been done,
but we are continuing to invest,
we're continuing to invest in that,
and also I think Will spoke about earlier
for those of you who attended the keynote,
that it is an ecosystem
and we believe in that.
And we are working with a lot of partners
there, as well.
So yeah, that's kind of my answer there.
Thank you, Naz.
Okay, I have two questions on pricing,
which I'm going to club together.
So I have one question which is,
“Could you provide more information
around the proposed
subscription pricing for Stripe Billing,
and then, how does your pricing compare
to existing solutions in the market?”
So maybe I'll kick off and Shankar,
you could add on as you see fit.
So for folks who were
in the prior session,
we announced that we are going
to be adding subscription pricing
for both Stripe Billing and Stripe Tax.
And that is going to be coming
this summer.
And the way that
this is going to be structured
is that you will effectively pay
for an entitlement,
which will entitle you
to a certain amount of,
for example,
payment volume in the case of Tax,
in the case of Billing,
you know, an entitlement
perhaps of transactions
for the case of Tax.
And then if you exceed
that fixed predictable entitlement,
you'll pay some amount over that.
And you know, as typical
in the market, right,
we will have a price curve
that's calibrated the right way
between our pay-as-you-go pricing,
which will continue to exist.
We're not taking away
pay-as-you-go pricing.
And we're adding subscription pricing
for our customers
who prefer just
a more predictable way to pay.
In terms of, kind of, the value
equation on pricing,
you know, I think we like
to match price with value.
I think folks who have been
with Stripe Billing for a long time
know that we've been innovating
on the product for many years,
you know, shipped a ton of features
today, right?
And we're looking for a price point
that's very competitive in the market
and compares favorably
to other third-party flares.
And also, you know,
building it in-house internally.
I don't know, Shankar,
if you have anything to add there?
Nope, you've covered it.
All right, rockin'.
You get the next question then.
“What are the largest risks
with new businesses implementing
Stripe Billing?”
Two-parter, additionally,
“how will the automations
alter over time
as the AI revolution continues?”
Okay, so the largest risks
when it comes to implementing
Stripe Billing.
I think the biggest one based on
what I've seen so far
amongst quite a few
large integrations to Stripe
is how often we underestimate the benefits
of thinking through the nuances
of all the details end to end.
People usually start off with, okay,
high level, this makes sense.
You know, one particular aspect,
maybe the configuration
of your product catalog makes sense,
but you also have to think through
how that works well across the other parts
of the revenue life cycle.
So how that integrates with invoices,
how you want invoices to be rendered,
how you want subscription updates
to be handled,
how you want prorations to be handled.
And so I think the most important thing
is to make sure
you think of your use cases end to end.
I think not thinking through that,
we've seen cases where
users might get into an integration
and then, oops, realize that
they hadn't thought this through
and in many cases Stripe Billing
supports use cases,
but users that are just not aware of it,
so please go through our documentation,
let us know where you see there are gaps.
But I think thinking through
those use cases
is perhaps the most important thing.
With automations,
it's a very interesting question.
For us, we think of automations
as ultimately enabling,
basically modeling,
all of your business workflows
and not just within Stripe.
It can even be workflows
that happen outside of Stripe eventually.
For example,
a very high-value invoice goes over a deal...
you might just want to send
a Slack message to somebody.
Or a payment fails, and you want to send
an intercom message to your customer,
and so on and so forth.
And I think with AI,
there are so many other tools
that are coming up
to help you in your business workflows.
And so I think
there is a lot of opportunity
to automate all of that
and make sure it works seamlessly
across your revenue life cycle.
I think one thing I'd like to add to that,
like with the migrations,
maybe not a risk, but for existing,
like for those launching
new business models,
obviously, you know, a different story.
But for the ones migrating
your existing subscriptions
over to Stripe Billing,
I think migrations ends up being
a very complex task, as well.
So I just want to state we,
like at Stripe,
we've launched
our migration tooling as well.
We've already migrated, what,
$400 million worth of solutions with that.
So yeah, very excited about that.
So migrations comes to mind when risks
with billing integrations,
when you talk about that.
Awesome, okay,
so now for our number one
most upvoted question,
drum roll, please.
For you Kathy,
“Is tax separated from Payments
like the way Billing is,
and how does it compete
with niche tax providers like Avalara?”
So I think the beauty of our tax product
is it can be both.
For users who are on Stripe Payments
and on integrations like Billing,
Invoices, Payment Links, and Checkout,
our integration time could be as easy
as toggling something on the Dashboard
and then Stripe Tax is on.
So we save a ton of integration time.
And also for users who have,
actually even are not on Stripe Payments,
they can use our Stripe Tax API,
which is completely agnostic,
to just send us what the product is,
and the location,
call our API and get a rate back.
So that can be used on Stripe Payments
or not on Stripe Payments.
And as I mentioned earlier,
now people can upload
their tax information
from other payment processors,
or send it to us via connectors, as well.
So we are payment-agnostic.
Sorry, what's the second part?
How do we compete with
niche tax solutions like Avalara?
Which, I love that.
What we try to do,
so I mentioned the integration time
is vastly faster.
It could be from zero to two weeks
compared to a long time.
We have users who come back
to us from Avalara
or from other competitors
and just say like,
“It's not worth investing
the developer time in that,
they just want to use Stripe Tax.”
And we seek to have an opinionated stance
that we help you figure out
the best tax solution for your business
versus your tax team having to spend
a ton of time figuring out and customizing
these heavy software solutions.
Awesome. Thank you, Kathy.
Well, we are at time.
Unfortunately, we did not get to
all of your questions,
but please come find us at the Revenue
and Finance Automation demo desk.
We'd be thrilled to chat with you
about all the questions that you had
and you can also see all the features live
that we shipped today.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
(upbeat music)