Collison brothers have earned their Stripes as multi-billion euro business grows

Brothers Patrick and John Collinson, aged 28 and 26 respectively, are two of the world’s youngest billionaires. Their online payment company, Stripe, is valued at €7.8bn, says Ashlee Vance.

It might come as a surprise that the web’s financial infrastructure is old and slow. For years, the explosive growth of e-commerce has outpaced the underlying technology; companies wanting to set up shop have to go to a bank, a payment processor, and ‘gateways’ that handle connections between the two.

That takes weeks, lots of people, and fee after fee. Much of the software that processes the transactions is decades old, and the updates have been written by banks, credit-card companies, and financial middlemen, none of whom are known for elegant coding.