Stripe CEO on the Future of How We Spend

Yeah. So, we definitely watch this stuff like a hawk. We're always looking for the next recession around a corner. You know, they talk about markets climbing a wall of worry, and that's definitely how we feel where we're worrying as we watch things. But I will say right now from everything we see on both the consumer side and the business side, the wallets are open. You know, people's spend is healthy. There's a sense of optimism and especially on the B2B side of things. We see a lot of spend on the AI tools and AI products and services. And I don't know, people like to expend a lot of hot air on you know, is AI a bubble and all this kind of stuff. The thing we see is everyone's pretty happy with what they're buying. You know, no one is saying I did a lot of AI enablement of customer service but you know what, I'm going back to doing it the old-fashioned way. Like zero people are saying that. And so we just see a lot of optimism in the business climate.

Again, I think the level of spend tends to be dominated by the macroeconomic factors and how consumers are feeling. And again, as far as we can tell right now, consumer spend is holding up pretty healthily. I think what agentic commerce will do is change the nature of spending. And so, you know, what's really going on, you all have probably seen it, is we just launched in October with OpenAI buying directly within ChatGPT. And that was a very natural evolution for them because you all have probably had the experience of doing product research within an AI app. It works really well. And it turns out that then going and filling out a whole bunch of web pages and clicking through seven different screens and where do I put my wallet and everything like that, that is not a conversion optimizing outcome. And so instead, what first OpenAI with ChatGPT and many of the other AI applications are doing are making it so that the product that you discovered directly within a back and forth with ChatGPT, you can then go convert directly there. I think what will then happen is it's a very interesting force that changes the nature of distribution where previously you might have gone to an aggregator site to find something, you might have done a search or something like that. Now there's a different discovery engine. You can have many more targeted conversational searches. Like you're looking for furniture and you're saying okay I want something that has kind of this feeling and also by the way it should have these dimensions, fits within this space and these are the manufacturers I like already. Like none of that is stuff you can do with existing keyword-based search and you're going to see the conversions based on that. And so we think it could be quite a democratizing force because you could lead to discovery of lesser-known brands.

I think if your only value prop is aggregation and discovery within the current paradigms, you're going to have a lot of questions to answer. But if you sell based on the value of the brand and the product and people have very strong brand affinity, that brand affinity is going to exist regardless of whether people go to your website or whether they buy it agentically or something like that. Or you know, Amazon has invested for decades in their logistics and fulfillment footprint. And so they have phenomenal advantages here to be able to get the product to you very quickly for a low price. And so I think the discovery and aggregation advantages are going to change but many businesses are differentiating based on different actions.

Yes. So this is actually a trend that has gone not widely remarked upon because things like AI get much more airtime but basically over the past 10 years many countries have started saying we want to be more involved in our digital payments infrastructure and we want to potentially provide that or have that run through our systems. And so many people point to what the Indian government did with first Aadhaar and then UPI, the government-run payment system as one of the initial systems there where it is a very well-designed low-cost payment system that is now extremely widely used throughout India. What then happened is many other countries saw what had happened in India and said hey that's a great idea we should do that. And so Brazil rolled out Pix and it was launched in 2019. It is now completely ubiquitous. The Pix network does on average two transactions per Brazilian per day. It has displaced not just other forms of digital payment but huge amounts of cash. And we could go through different countries. And so what this has then meant for Stripe and businesses running on Stripe is that our businesses, you know, an Amazon or an OpenAI or someone who's using Stripe to accept payments, they don't want to think about all this stuff. Their eyes would glaze over if we were talking about all these payment differences. They just want to be able to sell their products and offer them in all the countries where people are. And we notice that these AI companies especially are going global much faster than the prior generation of say e-commerce or SaaS companies. And so what Stripe ends up doing for these businesses is acting as the universal-ish layer, the translator that can make any customer able to turn up and use their method of payment, which may be a new sovereign method of payment, with this product.

Well, now I'm just talking about customer payments. You're now getting into agentic and kind of machine-to-machine payments which we are not seeing a huge amount of yet but that is the really interesting thing coming forward we think. Which is maybe everyone's talking about agentic coding and the fact that there's a huge amount of Twitter hype around Claude Code and things like this where people are seeing incredible results. But as your Claude Code instance is going and building something for you, you probably want it to not just be able to kind of write code and execute inside a virtual machine, you probably want to be able to go use third-party services. And so you need to give your Claude Code a credit card or some way to go spend money in the broader world. And so we're actually building a lot of products for agentic and machine-to-machine payments and we actually also just incubated a blockchain for very scalable payments which we think a lot of the utility will be for these kind of high-throughput machine-to-machine use cases.

So we think stable coins will follow a bit of an arc. Right now we are already seeing a lot of stable coin utility but basically a lot of the utility that we're seeing has some kind of cross-border component because if you're in the US things kind of work fine from a domestic point of view. If you're in Europe similarly there's low-cost bank transfers, it works well enough. It's not perfect. Whereas if you are a multinational company looking to pay out people all around the world, including in a lot of emerging markets, there are no good solutions for that today. You know, they're high cost, they're very slow, and there actually just isn't connectivity in a lot of these markets. And so we're seeing a lot of product market fit and we made two acquisitions in crypto recently, Bridge and Privy. And we've had a lot of success with crypto orchestration where basically people are coming to us because they want to be able to pay out money around the world or they want to be able to build functionality where you can hold dollar balances within your app or something like that. And we're again starting to see these successes. One of my favorite of our customers is a company called Felix Pago. They're doing remittances, but it's remittances powered by stable coins. And so they have this incredibly fast-growing remittance app and stable coins are a big part of how they've managed to build such a low-friction and compelling product offering. So anyway, that's what is currently working really well in stable coins, a lot of this cross-border international stuff. But we think there'll be a bit of a WhatsApp effect where WhatsApp conquered the United States from the outside in. It started as an international phenomenon because people did not have free SMS in many countries and so WhatsApp became really popular and then people in the US who had friends outside of the country or immigrants or cosmopolitan folks would use it and now it's become quite popular within the US but again it was this outside-in adoption story. We think something very similar is likely to happen with crypto and stable coins where it starts for these cross-border use cases. But then that gets the flywheel going and gets people familiar with the product and they have money in a wallet or something like that and then you start to see more regular adoption of just using it to power a fintech app or to send money on a peer-to-peer basis or something like that.

Over the coming few years.

I think banks were much more skeptical of stable coins five or 10 years ago and now you're seeing much more embrace. I think it helps that things like, you know, the term tokenized deposits you'll hear, which is kind of a related but separate concept. It seems like banks are starting to have some success with. And so, you know, Jamie Dimon was one of the most quotable famous Bitcoin bears and, you know, if you Google, he has these mill- he's just like extremely colorful and quotable in general, but he's got a bunch of fabulous quotes about how terrible Bitcoin is in all sorts of various ways. And now, they're having a lot of success with tokenized deposits, and so I think the bank posture towards stable coins is really changing.