Intercom teams up with online payments business Stripe

Software company Intercom has announced an integration partnership with fellow Irish-Californian start-up Stripe, the online payments business founded by Limerick's Collison brothers.

Intercom, which raised $23 million (€16.8 million) in new funding in January, said the new integration would “give businesses using both services a more complete understanding of their customers.”

“Intercom is betting that Stripe will become the de-facto payment system for web businesses, and the company is focusing all payment-related integration efforts on the Stripe platform,” an Intercom spokesman added.

He said combining Intercom, a customer relationship management (CRM), with Stripe would give businesses an advantage when dealing with their online customers.

“Payment information provides valuable context in understanding your customer base- by bringing it into Intercom alongside product behaviour, interaction history, personal and social information, SaaS (software as a service) businesses can communicate with customers in an even more relevant and personal way,” he said.

VentureBeat, a technology news speciality service, described the integration as “part of a growing trend among CRM companies, which are increasingly collecting and collating hyper-detailed customer data for businesses.”

Stripe has been expanding rapidly this year after it was chosen to power the "Buy" button for Facebook users using the social network to shop online as well as being named by Apple as one of its partners for its new Apple Pay service, along with Visa and First Data.

In a blog post Intercom quoted Patrick Collision, the chief executive of Stripe, as saying: "Pretty much every SaaS business in the world can benefit from Intercom. So we're super excited that they're integrating so deeply with Stripe."