Stripe Acquires OpenChannel for Ecosystem Integration

Digital payment processing firm Stripe on Monday (Dec. 6) announced the acquisition of app marketplace software platform OpenChannel, which helps businesses build app ecosystems for third-party developers and users.

Under the terms of the acquisition, OpenChannel’s team will become part of Stripe’s remote hubs and work on ecosystem integrations for Stripe, the joint announcement says.

Last week, Stripe teamed up with payment orchestration platform Spreedly to fight fraud with Stripe’s advanced solution, Radar, which detects and blocks fraud through machine learning capabilities that come from training on data from millions of businesses worldwide.

Read more: Spreedly Teams with Stripe Radar to Fight Fraud

Stripe processes billions in payments annually, so Radar has the ability to give every payment a risk score and intuitively stop many risky payments.

Durham, North Carolina-based Spreedly offers a complete payment services marketplace that optimizes digital transactions and helps enterprises and fast-growing companies build up their digital business even faster.

Stripe has dual headquarters in San Francisco and Dublin, along with offices in London, Paris, Singapore, Tokyo and more. The company builds economic infrastructure for the internet, and businesses use their software to accept payments and manage their businesses online.

Also read: Crypto Payments are Back on the Bargaining Table for Stripe After Dropping Bitcoin in 2018

Meanwhile, Stripe is reconsidering accepting cryptocurrency for payments after ending support for bitcoin in 2018 because of unstable prices and challenges in using it in many transactions at the time, Stripe co-founder and president John Collison said last month at the Fintech Abu Dhabi festival.

Stripe said in a blog post in 2018 that bitcoin “has evolved to become better-suited to being an asset than being a means of exchange” and bitcoin had become less useful for payments.

Recent developments in crypto are making bitcoin more appealing as a payment option and, although the company doesn’t have active plans to reinstate their use, accepting crypto is “not implausible.”

Tara Seshan, business lead at Stripe Treasury, told PYMNTS in a recent interview that the company isn’t quite ready to reverse course on accepting cryptocurrency, but there’s a place for digital coins in the business world.

“It’s certainly a space that we’re paying very, very close attention to,” Seshan said.