Stripe Steps Up UK Expansion With London Office

Stripe is reportedly opening a new London location as part of a larger U.K. expansion.

This new office will house 250 workers from the payments company’s engineering, sales, partnerships, financial compliance and operations departments, with plans to hire 30 more workers, Stripe President and Co-founder John Collison told Bloomberg News Tuesday (May 20).

“When you zoom out, it’s just the largest city for us in terms of businesses starting with us,” Collison said. “We’re still expanding quite a bit. We may need a new office later.”

The report notes that Great Britain is Stripe’s second largest market, with more of the company’s users based in London than any other city around the world.

According to Bloomberg, Stripe also plans to introduce new payment tools in the U.K. including a small business financing service called Stripe Capital. This will let British businesses accept pay-by-bank options.

Research by PYMNTS Intelligence, from the study “Tracking the Digital Payments Takeover: Consumer Familiarity Controls Account-to-Account Payment Growth,” has found a high level of satisfaction among pay-by-bank users.

“This could be attributed to these platforms’ success in making the payment experience not just seamless but also part of an ecosystem where users frequently interact and transact,” the study noted. “Because consumers complete many of these transactions within a known network — sending money to the same recipients — the comfort and trust levels are higher, reinforcing platform loyalty.”

Meanwhile, additional research by PYMNTS Intelligence showed that a knowledge gap could be preventing pay-by-bank, also known as account-to-account payments, from becoming more widely accepted.

While 36% of consumers use these methods, the same number of people said a lack of understanding is keeping them from using pay-by-bank.

Meanwhile, Stripe’s John Collison and his brother, Co-founder Patrick Collison, argued last month that FinTech industry customers have gone from seeking ways to accept online payments to asking for “software-defined financial services.”

They made these remarks at the company’s annual user conference in San Francisco, with Patrick Collison noting that Stripe has evolved from enabling acceptance of online payments to being asked to offer things like spending accounts and corporate cards for merchants.

“These new use cases aren’t about aren’t about payments in the traditional sense,” John Collison added. “The problem is broader. What businesses want, we realized, is software-defined financial services — a layer that knits together the existing financial ecosystem in such a way that money becomes programmable, in real time, and with comprehensive global coverage. With rich data to enable business insights and ML [machine learning].”