Stripe Launches Billing Product In Europe

Payments company Stripe has announced that it is rolling out its billing product in Europe.

Built on top of Stripe’s core payments infrastructure, Stripe Billing simplifies the recurring billing process for SaaS and subscription-based companies. It is now generally available for all European customers.

The company noted that the subscription eCommerce market has grown more than 100 percent a year over the past five years — and is growing even faster in Europe than in the U.S.

“Subscription and SaaS [software as a service] companies have been some of the internet’s greatest success stories up to now, but we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible, especially here in Europe,” Tara Seshan, Product Manager for Stripe Billing, said in a press release. “With Stripe Billing, companies of all sizes now have access to advanced invoicing tools that will also help them comply with SCA and VAT requirements. We’re excited to power the next generation of European subscription companies as we continue building the economic infrastructure that will grow the GDP of the internet.”

Billing uses Stripe’s advanced machine learning infrastructure to help businesses boost their revenue and growth, while also significantly reducing engineering efforts.

In addition, Stripe Billing automatically generates invoices on business’ behalf. And as an added benefit for European businesses, Stripe Billing also provides the easiest path to Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) compliance for online subscriptions, and includes support for value added tax (VAT) across the European Union.

“SaaS, subscription and recurring revenue business models have become a major force for economic growth on the internet across Europe. However, for the vast majority of companies, running a billing and subscription system at any scale is both laborious and costly. This function will become even more complex once the SCA regulations take effect on September 14, 2019 in Europe,” said Jordan McKee, research director at 451 Research. “Stripe Billing aims to mitigate this complexity and expense for European companies of all sizes by smoothing the path to SCA compliance, and democratizing access to enterprise-grade billing tools. Ultimately, tools like Stripe Billing represent an important element of the economic infrastructure that will facilitate the creation of a Digital Single Market across Europe.”