Specialist
Former divisional leader at Stripe Inc
Agenda
- Use-case positioning across payments infrastructure
- Strategic direction, new product launches and further product expansion potential
- Competitive dynamics vs Braintree (NYSE: PYPL), Adyen (AMS: ADYEN), Square (NASDAQ: SQ), legacy players and others
- International penetration, including emerging markets
Questions
1.
What’s your updated overview of Stripe’s market environment? What key trends are impacting the business and should investors pay attention to?
2.
Who is Stripe’s target customer and how is that changing in the longer term? Is the company facing any challenges in further penetrating the enterprise market?
3.
You said Stripe’s go-to-market is changing to cater to the enterprise market – there’s also been a CRO [Chief Revenue Officer] hire and sales team revamp. Is anything still missing to drive penetration there? What product adjustments were made to be a better fit for the enterprise market?
4.
What other products might Stripe add to its ecosystem to significantly drive interest and further penetration in the enterprise market? Is any product lacking that might be a significant catalyst?
5.
How would you size Stripe’s TAM across its offerings?
6.
Are any of Stripe’s various offerings in payments becoming commoditised? How does commoditisation of some of those offerings dictate Stripe’s product roadmap?
7.
What net take rate might merchant acquirers typically get with a large enterprise customer of over USD 1bn in revenue? How could that net take rate change over time?
8.
How is Stripe’s technology and go-to-market differentiated vs Adyen, Square, Braintree and other top players?
9.
You highlighted how Stripe has products that no other player has, such as Stripe Connect and reoccurring payments. Do you think the strength of that ecosystem is a differentiator that significantly helps win business vs peers?
10.
Adyen is one of Stripe’s most direct competitors but could the company easily start to offer similar products to Stripe, especially ones that other players don’t have? Which players have an edge on Stripe? Do other players offer a product that Stripe potentially isn’t interested in? What might drive customers towards rivals?
11.
What’s your confidence in Stripe in the long term? Could Stripe overtake Adyen in the upper-mid and enterprise markets? When might Stripe take the lead against Adyen?
12.
Which players pose the greatest threat to Stripe’s growth ambitions?
13.
Beyond pricing, what can legacy players do to abate Stripe’s disruption? Could FIS or Fiserv make an acquisition or something else to significantly increase its technology and fill a gap in its offering? What was driving customers to go to Stripe?
14.
As Stripe increasingly pushes into the emerging markets, how might local LATAM players such as Ebanx and dLocal be impacted? Do local players hold any advantage from focusing purely on emerging markets? Is it just a matter of time before Stripe or Adyen displaces them?
15.
What could be the core challenges for Stripe to really penetrate some of the emerging markets? What needs to be resolved that dLocal and Ebanx have already solved?
16.
What are the considerations around international expansion? How does Stripe decide which country to expand into? How long is the ramp-up time to adjust to a new environment and pick up traction?
17.
Stripe acquired Paystack which gave the company access to the African market but what’s your assessment of its ability to penetrate further? What are the greatest challenges in doing so in such a unique market?
18.
How is Stripe Connect differentiated from the traditional integrated payments revenue-share model and the PayFac model? Why do you think this Stripe Connect model is likely to be the winning payments model?
19.
Can you give a loose estimate for Stripe Connect’s contribution to the broader business? Either a revenue or broader payments volume would be useful to give a better understanding of Stripe Connect’s significance.
20.
Stripe is rolling out an indirect tax automation product offering. What’s the likely vision and strategy for incorporating the TaxJar acquisition into the broader Stripe business? Is it a threat to Avalara and Vertex?
21.
How much overlap is there with Stripe customers using Avalara or Vertex? Presumably the customers using Avalara or Vertex and already using Stripe have an economic incentive to switch to the TaxJar embedded offering. Would those customers be very likely to switch?
22.
Stripe estimates that additional offerings such as card issuing, merchant financing and card-present payments could expand customer lifetime value by 2x to 5x. Do you expect a greater or smaller lifetime value expansion than that? What key assumptions should we challenge with those numbers? Perhaps services’ pricing power diminishing sooner than expected.
23.
How could product expansion evolve? What might Stripe focus on next, whether insurance, AP [accounts payable] automation or digital banking?
24.
What key questions would you encourage an investor or analyst to ask Stripe’s management?