Stripe still has enormous potential for growth predict Collison brothers

With only 5 per cent of global commerce taking place online at present there is still a huge growth opportunity for payments firm Stripe, according to its Limerick-born founders.

Patrick and John Collison said this massive potential completely justified the company's recent $9.2 billion valuation.

Speaking in an interview with Bloomberg, the Collisons' said that while they were "sometimes paranoid" about whether they could deliver on the opportunity, the potential for growth supported the valuation "many times over."

"The internet economy is so vast and so much smaller than it will be," said Patrick Collison. "On a global basis, the market size and the opportunities have never been greater."

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The brothers, who said they never set out to build a big company, predicted they could go public at some point, but that this wasn’t something which was on the cards in the near-term.

"The way we've always thought about ourselves is that we are in an expansion phase and are so far from reaching the plateau...we're fixated on making sure we're capitalising on the opportunities," Mr Collision said.

Stripe, which was founded by the brothers in 2009, started off securing small clients but now counts companies such as Macy's, GE, Adidas, Docusign, Slack, Nasdaq and the NFL among its customers.

The company employs more than 1,000 people globally and handles billions of dollars in transactions each year.

Stripe offers payment-processing services for online and mobile transactions. It supports credit-card payments in more than 130 different 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, including Sequoia Capital, Visa, American Express, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

The company founders, who are both still aged under 30, joined the billionaires club last year, according to an Oxfam report.

Mr Collison said the company’s success was not in spite of working with start-ups, but because of it.

“They (start-ups) will assess you precisely on a product’s merits and what helps them fulfil their mission and goals. it is really punishing,” he said.

Stripe, which earlier this year announced plans to establish an engineering hub in Dublin, urged those working in the tech sector to work on their attitudes towards people from different enviroments.

“The tech industry has to be a place where people of any background or demographic can really thrive and there have been some big missteps on that front,” said Mr Collison.