Stripe to begin offering bank accounts

Limerick brothers Patrick and John Collison say banks  will now be able to offer checking accounts and other financial services through e-commerce providers

The Collison brothers - Patrick and John - founded the mobile payments tech company Stripe.

Stripe will team up with some of the world’s largest banks to offer checking accounts to businesses that sell their wares on e-commerce platforms such as Shopify.

Stripe, founded by Limerick brothers Patrick and John Collison, said banks including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs Group and Barclays will now be able to offer checking accounts and other financial services through e-commerce providers. If a coffee shop, for instance, uses Shopify to sell mugs and coffee beans online, it will now be able to open a bank account too.

“Everything about running an online business has been transformed by technology, but business banking has largely been left behind,” Karim Temsamani, head of banking and financial products at Stripe, said in a statement. “But we’re changing this.” Businesses use Stripe’s software to accept online payments, and the company has benefited during the pandemic as people stuck at home have relied more heavily on e-commerce to do their shopping. The company is in talks to raise a new funding round that could value it at as much as $100 billion, Bloomberg reported last month.

For online firms, setting up a bank account takes an average of seven days, Stripe said. Almost a quarter of businesses ultimately have to send a fax to open the account, and more than half need to visit a bank branch. With its latest offering, which will be known as Stripe Treasury, the company is seeking to disrupt all that.

Still, Stripe is relying on established banks for the service.

“Our vision is for this partnership to fuel global commerce by enabling Stripe to launch the next-generation banking proposition for their clients,” Manish Kohli, global head of payments and receivables in Citigroup’s treasury and trade solutions business, said in the statement.

Stripe’s software, which competes with Square and Paypal, is used by businesses to accept payments. According to its website, Stripe’s customers include Amazon, Salesforce.com, Lyft and Instacart.

The company has benefited during the pandemic with more shoppers turning to e-commerce. It’s gone on the offence during the downturn this year, starting a card-issuing service for US clients and agreeing to acquire a Nigerian startup to expand in Africa.

John and Patrick Collison founded Stripe in 2010. The duo sold their first company for $5 million when they were teenagers and are now worth about $4.3 billion each, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

• Bloomberg