Sessions 2022 and product highlights from the year

Payments Platform Expands With New Methods, Tools, and Global Reach

Stripe’s annual user conference, Sessions, opened with a keynote covering the company’s latest product updates and releases, including the formal launch of Stripe Apps. The event also highlighted how merchants are navigating the current internet economy. Beyond the keynote, Stripe detailed a host of updates across its payments platform, spanning conversion optimization, fraud prevention, and global market expansion.

Streamlined Checkout and Payment Configuration

A key focus this year was simplifying how businesses build and customize checkout experiences. The new Payment Element is an embeddable UI component that supports more than 20 payment methods through a single integration. For those using Checkout, the experience is now more flexible: you can modify colors and fonts to align with your brand, host the page on your own domain, suggest add-on products, and allow customers to switch between monthly and annual subscription billing.

Payment Links also gained functionality, including the ability to generate QR codes, sell multiple products or subscriptions in one link, and use URL parameters to prefill customer details or improve campaign tracking. A new API allows businesses to create these links programmatically at scale. For those using Checkout, Payment Links, or the Payment Element, the Dashboard now offers straightforward toggles to enable or disable any of the 20+ supported payment methods without needing to touch the underlying UI code.

Expanding Payment Method Coverage

To help businesses meet customers’ preferences, Stripe broadened the roster of available local payment methods and extended existing ones to new user bases. ACH debits in the US were overhauled with instant bank account verification, working across all integration methods. Link is now being offered to Elements users as a way to speed up checkout; Stripe notes that millions of consumers already use Link via Checkout and complete purchases four times faster than non-Link customers.

Buy now, pay later options such as Afterpay and Klarna are available to more users, with Affirm support expected soon. Local bank transfers are being simplified globally, beginning in Japan and extending to Mexico, Europe, and the UK. A new integration for UnionPay and WeChat Pay lets businesses in the US, UK, Europe, and most of Asia reach over a billion Chinese consumers. Konbini payments in Japan cover more than 34,000 convenience stores through a single Stripe integration. Support was also added for Southeast Asian methods like GrabPay and for national schemes including PayNow (Singapore), PromptPay (Thailand), UPI (India), and NPP/PayTo (Australia).

Fraud Protection and Enterprise Reliability

For high-volume platforms, Stripe expanded its Radar for Fraud Teams toolkit with dozens of new rule attributes for fine-grained fraud control and improved insights into rule performance, including counts of blocked payments and estimated false positives. Radar now also provides benchmarking data so businesses can compare their dispute, false positive, and block rates against peers in their region or industry.

A new intelligent card verification feature is rolling out, initially through Radar for Fraud Teams. Instead of blocking a potentially suspicious transaction, the system prompts the customer to photograph their credit card; Radar then assesses authenticity in under a second. To improve authorization rates for recurring revenue, Network Tokens keep card data current, with benefits already seen by businesses in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand and planned expansion this year.

Stripe reported maintaining 99.999% uptime since the previous year’s conference, including through the Black Friday and Cyber Monday period. The company was also named a leader in the 2022 Forrester Wave: Merchant Payment Providers report, cited as a “best fit for technology-forward payment teams.”

Unified In-Person and Online Commerce

Stripe Terminal is now live in 15 countries, with new reader hardware and features such as on-reader tipping for hospitality businesses. A server-driven integration allows platforms to use the Stripe API instead of platform-specific SDKs. At Sessions, Stripe previewed a new smart card reader designed to handle payments and run custom Android applications from a single device.

Wider Market Availability

Stripe added support for crypto businesses processing fiat payments, including integrated fraud prevention and authorization optimization. The platform is now available in 47 markets with beta launches in Indonesia and Thailand. Coverage of the European Union will soon be complete with the addition of Croatia, alongside new support for Gibraltar and Liechtenstein.

Financial Management and Revenue Operations

A major theme this year was automating finance workflows. The newly launched Stripe Data Pipeline syncs all Stripe data and reports directly to a business’s Snowflake or Amazon Redshift data warehouse with just a Dashboard connection. Sigma now includes out-of-the-box reports like Activity, Balance, and Payout Reconciliation, plus additional data sets, to accelerate book closing.

Stripe Billing added a prebuilt subscription page for Checkout, a subscription upsell feature, and an updated customer portal that handles both recurring transactions and one-time invoices, complete with free-form cancellation reasons. New test clocks let developers simulate subscription changes over time. Smart retry tools were refined with more frequent retry options; Stripe says its features helped businesses recover 38% of failed recurring transactions last year.

New quotes streamline the quote-to-cash process, allowing businesses to share price estimates that can later be converted to invoices or subscriptions. A Salesforce connector is in development so sales teams can create subscriptions without leaving the CRM. The Billing Scale package now bundles Invoicing Plus and Revenue Recognition to further automate revenue operations.

Revenue Recognition supports data import and real-time revenue tracking for companies of all sizes, including those complying with ASC 606 and IFRS 15. Stripe Invoicing gained streamlined ACH direct debit, scheduled payments, automated tax collection, and the option to set due dates to “today.” Stripe notes that 70% of its invoices are paid within 24 hours. Stripe Tax expanded to seven new markets—including Canada, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Iceland, and the UAE—bringing its total to 39, and now works with nearly all payment integration types.

Connect expands payout options and tax tooling

Stripe Connect now serves more than 10,000 software platforms, marketplaces, and enterprises. Recent updates focus on broader geographic payout coverage, more flexible currency handling, and tools that automate the tax paperwork connected account models require.

Platforms can now pay sellers, freelancers, and content creators in their preferred currencies, with cross-border payout support extended to more than 70 countries. A new Express mobile app gives solo entrepreneurs a way to track platform earnings, view scheduled payouts, and monitor cash flow. Stripe also introduced crypto payouts; Twitter is using the feature to let creators access earnings.

On the compliance side, Connect platforms can generate and edit 1099 forms directly in the Dashboard. Stripe handles e-filing, delivers copies to payees, and runs Tax Identification Number (TIN) verification checks. Connected accounts manage their own taxpayer information and download 1099 copies through the Express Dashboard and Express mobile app.

Platform workflow improvements include finer payout and pay-in controls for managing risk and fraudulent accounts in the Dashboard, plus a modular connected account details page that gives space to manage attached products like Capital and Treasury. Stripe also published a risk management guide covering onboarding, monitoring, and mitigation.

Financial Connections and Identity updates

Financial Connections lets businesses link users' bank accounts to verify account ownership before payouts, check balances before initiating debits, and reduce fraud. Stripe Identity, now in its second year, is used by customers like Discord and Peerspace for KYC and fraud reduction. Identity response time is under three seconds, and new fraud tools help platforms screen out bad actors. Use cases include verifying identities before large purchases and in regulated industries such as car rentals.

Developer surface: apps, docs, and SDKs

The public beta of Stripe Apps lets developers build apps directly on Stripe, using the Stripe API to listen for webhooks and read/write data. The Stripe App Marketplace lists the first 50+ apps—including DocuSign, Dropbox, Intercom, and Ramp—with installation opening in the coming weeks.

Stripe open-sourced Markdoc, the content-authoring system behind Stripe Docs, for building documentation and static pages. Within Docs, the integration builder offers an interactive API onboarding path, and Stripe Shell provides a hosted terminal and graphical CLI in the browser. A VS Code extension lets developers build and test integrations inside the editor, and a Stripe-maintained React Native client library is now available.

Embedded finance products mature

Treasury, Issuing, and Capital continue to power banking-as-a-service offerings. Shopify Balance, built on Treasury, launched in January and supports 100,000+ small businesses. Shopify, Jobber, and Ramp use the BaaS APIs for cash management, card issuance, and embedded loan offers.

Issuing developers can fork a GitHub sample to speed up card launches; custom card inventory is viewable in the Dashboard. Stripe Issuing is now available to UK businesses, adding to the EU/UK contactless cards launched last year. Capital expanded loan coverage to include refinancing options for active loans, improved underwriting, and a new $250K offer size. Users can link bank accounts via Financial Connections to potentially increase their loan amount.

Company-building and ecosystem updates

Stripe Atlas automates more of the company formation process. It checks business name availability, and automated IRS filing means non-US founders wait six months less for tax IDs. US founders receive their EIN in one business day versus the previous 25; Stripe says it has saved founders more than 100 years of wait time since the pandemic began. Teenagers can now also use Atlas.

The Stripe Partner Ecosystem connects technology and consulting firms with Stripe users, giving partners resources for building on Stripe's infrastructure. Separately, Stripe launched Frontier with Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, and McKinsey—an advance market commitment structured to guarantee nearly $1B in carbon removal purchases over the next eight years, enabling longer-term agreements with removal companies.