Online payments company Stripe introduces partner programme

Stripe, the fast-growing online payments company established by Limerick brothers Patrick and John Collison, has introduced a new partner programme.

Companies including Sage, Intercom, Shopify, Xero, Tito, Docusign and Taxamo are among the first to be added as verified partners.

Partner programmes, which encourage companies to sell or recommend a particular company’s products and/or services, are common enough in the hardware space of the technology sector. However, they are rare in the world of online payments.

The new programme seeks to formalise a number of informal partnerships Stripe has established over the years, but also provides additional benefits including priority support and early invites to product betas.

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The new programme will have two partner types and two tiers.

According to Stripe, for every €1 it currently makes, partners can expect to make €1.42.

"Partners have integrated with Stripe for years: in fact, more than half of our fastest-growing users take advantage of one or more Stripe extensions," said Claire Hughes Johnson, Stripe chief operating officer. "But as Stripe is increasingly getting pulled up-market, our users have asked for an easier way to discover new platforms and apps, so we're delighted to announce our partner programme."

Stripe offers payment-processing services for online and mobile transactions. It supports credit-card payments in more than 130 currencies, bank transfers, Alipay and WeChat Pay. It previously also accepted bitcoin but recently ended support for such payments.

Stripe has received about $450 million in funding to date from investors that include Sequoia Capital, Visa, American Express, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. It is valued at more than $9 billion.