BlueSnap CEO On Visa/Stripe’s Payments Power Play

In the flurry of tweets and Wall Street reactions to the news that Visa is pairing up with Stripe, strategically and through direct investment, and that Stripe is raising money from a slew of investors, it’s worth garnering a reaction from someone with a little skin in the game.

PYMNTS spoke with Ralph Dangelmaier, chief executive officer of BlueSnap, an eCommerce player in payments processing – and a Stripe competitor – to get a sense of how the Visa/Stripe collaboration may impact mobile payments.

BlueSnap, based in Massachusetts, offers a payments processing solution that operates across more than 100 countries around the globe and across more than 60 currencies, with a focus on cross-border transactions. And the company is no stranger to investor excitement over eCommerce, as it raised $50 million late last year from a consortium that included Great Hill Partners and Parthenon Capital Partners.

According to Dangelmaier, and in response to PYMNTS’ questions, the Stripe capital raise shows that “Visa and American Express are clearly making a big bet on mobile checkout. They see the need to have technology that simplifies the process and empowers the merchant to create new and exciting consumer experiences. [The deal is] clearly about the elegance of the technology.”

With valuations tied to the latest funding round – reported to be ”less than $100 million” – touching as high as $5 billion, Stripe’s rumored worth is roughly one-tenth that of much larger peer PayPal, a sign to Dangelmaier that premiums are being doled out for technology innovations, with less emphasis on the payments processing model itself.

And, adds the executive, with Amex and Visa firmly aligned with Stripe, one should not count out the remaining payments juggernaut, MasterCard.

“I think we can expect that MasterCard is likewise working on strategies that enable MasterPass in the same way [as Stripe],” notes Dangelmaier, while the larger trend is toward a shift in power and control over payments “towards the merchants and away from the financial institution,” he surmised. “The payments industry needs technology players like Stripe, BlueSnap and Braintree to connect their legacy infrastructure to this new and exciting world.”

Stripe, maintains Dangelmaier, has made a mark with what he calls “easy to board” and “simple gateways.”

“As a merchant scales, they need to graduate to a more sophisticated gateway with ‘value-adds’ like coupons, upsells, fraud management and subscriptions,” he said. Scalability is part of the impetus behind Stripe’s deal with Visa, and also its gathering of larger customers, ranging from Facebook to Lyft to American Express.

And in a world where Stripe may grab the lion’s share of headlines, there’s still plenty of room for other players in the global and mobile commerce realm, notes Dangelmaier. Speaking of the Visa and Stripe announcement, the CEO says that “this is a ringing endorsement of our strategy that a global, mobile checkout with the cross-border rails is critical to the future of payments.”