1073. Insights: From stablecoins to AI agents - how Stripe is changing the internet economy

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1:14Welcome to Fintech Insider Insights, recorded live at Stripe Tour London. I'm Benjamin Ensor, Director of Research and Strategy at 11FS. Over the past two decades, digital payments have transformed how businesses move money. But for most companies, the financial and operational challenges have always been much wider than just the payments themselves. Today, larger businesses are thinking about liquidity, treasury, global money movement, and how new technologies like stablecoins fit into that picture. At the same time, artificial intelligence is poised to reshape how and where digital commerce happens, raising entirely new questions about how payments work when AI agents start acting on behalf of customers.

1:56So, in today's special episode, we're exploring both of these themes with two guests from Stripe. So, I'm delighted to be joined by Nitika Bansal, Head of Money Management and Crypto at Stripe. Welcome to Fintech Insider. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit about you and your role at Stripe? Yeah, hi. Firstly, thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be here. I've been at Stripe for the past eight years. and now in my most recent role, I manage an organization that looks after some of our most complex businesses, so platforms and marketplaces. I manage everything to do with how money moves around the world and I also manage our crypto offerings.

2:36And this is a role that spans product, engineering, operations, strategy, and it's around a team of 800 people around the world. So it's really exciting. So it's a huge role. Yes. A huge organization. So now Stripe has evolved a lot since 2011, since it was started as a payments company. You know, businesses have always been looking for more than payments acceptance. But, you know, from your perspective, what are you seeing as the biggest changes in how businesses are thinking about money and cash management today? How's that sort of changed? So there is one big change that we are seeing. Earlier, if you think about it, businesses had to be a certain size to even contemplate going global.

3:16Now, businesses are going global from day one. You know, we talk about the AI companies, There are a large number of AI companies getting started on a daily basis. And these companies are selling to something like 100 geographies from day one. You look at a company like Midjourney, Midjourney is selling to 200 geographies from day one. So all of these global companies have global revenue coming from many different geographies. And they need a way to manage this revenue. They need a way to handle the multiple currencies that their money is settling in. They need a way to convert these currencies.

3:45They need a way to then pay their global workforce, their contractors, their vendors, their suppliers around the world. And so the needs have evolved from just being a payments processing company to being a full stack infrastructure provider, a full stack provider. And this is why we built Treasury, which is our product, which helps companies sort of manage their financial operations on strike. Of course, it's much more complicated when you're managing multiple currencies and accepting multiple currencies. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Okay. And where are the biggest friction points for Stripes businesses today?

4:21What are the most challenging aspects? Is it fraud? Is it money movement? Settlement delays? What are the biggest friction points that you're hearing and trying to solve? So all of that, for sure. And I think the way I would describe this is, if you think about money, money's kind of stuck in the pre-internet era, right? Like everything on the internet moves really fast except for money. And so that's where most of the friction comes from. Companies find it extremely hard to move money cross-border. If you think about how, like, if you think about these companies accepting payments and doing more with their money, all of that happens on disparate systems.

4:58So if a company is operating in 15 geographies, they have to think about 15 partners, if not more. And so there's a fragmentation that they have to account for. And so just operating cross-border, operating globally is a huge problem. And then I think money should be, money should work how data works on the internet. It should be fast, it should be programmable, it should move cross-border really well. And that's essentially what we're trying to solve with stablecoins. And that's what we're trying to solve with our money management systems. And do you think business executives sort of realized that?

5:33Realized that the money is a strategic thing and that the CFO should be listened to? Totally. Completely agree. Completely agree. Okay. So you just mentioned stablecoins. I mean, stablecoin, there's been a lot of excitement about stablecoins, but there's also some skepticism in the market as well, right? And Stripe's been one of the most... To put it mildly. Yeah, indeed. And Stripe's been one of the most prominent advocates of stablecoins. You've embraced stablecoins. You've just been talking about them on the stage. What convinced you and Stripe that the stablecoins are part of the solution?

6:02Yeah, it's a great question. So I'll tell you what convinced me personally. There are serious big companies using stablecoins now. I think that's it. It's like we have real serious businesses using stablecoins. We're not trying to build just crypto products. We're trying to build stablecoins and crypto as infrastructure in all of our products. So I'll give you a few examples. And so one example I have is Meta. Meta is trying to pay its creators globally. And they want to pay their creators in Philippines and Colombia. and they're using stablecoins to do that because, again, money can move instantly.

6:39And the way they're doing it is they pay them in a link wallet such that it's very easy for the creators to then spend that money. So that's a payouts use case. And this use case applies to, again, any company that's operating globally. The other use case I'll give to you is we have global startups or YC companies even who are using treasury account to essentially accept money and then manage their money, pay other people, get cards for their employees. So a lot of this business activity is happening on Stablecoins. And then the last one that I love is Stablecoins is kind of a perfect solution for fintechs.

7:20So if you think about fintechs, they have a lot of remittance use cases. Often they are moving money cross-border. And so we have fintechs like Arc Finance, which is fintech based out of LATAM. Here we have Morse. And so we are seeing these fintechs being built from the ground up on stablecoins. And the problems that they're solving are both dollar access for their users, but then also making sure that they have, like, users around the world actually have access to financial rails they didn't before. So I think that's a really, really great use case. We're also working with users like Zeps, MoneyGram.

7:56And so just the fact that fintechs are able to now, they don't have to go country by country. They can build once and their services can be available in many different geographies. Ramp is a really great example. Ramp is an expense management platform. They've been primarily in the US and a little bit in the UK and Europe. And now they're expanding worldwide using stablecoin issuing. What are the benefits of, what are stablecoins bringing some of these businesses that you couldn't get with, I don't know, correspondent banking through Swift. Is it just faster? Is it cheaper? Or are there other benefits?

8:30Yeah. So you named the two really important ones, but I would describe the most fundamental benefit in my opinion. It is that, think of this as a financial building block. Earlier, if you had to go global, you would go get a partnership in a particular geography, then you'll have to go country by country. So the fact that if you tie it to what I started with, that companies and corporations are going global from day one, you kind of need a financial block that is global from day one. So I think that's a very primary big advantage. And then the two other things that I would describe is, one, any business doing anything cross-border.

9:10So, I mean, you could be a global business and you could primarily have a domestic in every geography business. But if you're moving money between cross-borders, stable coins are really important for that. And so the fact that they are cheap, they are instant, they are programmable, and they have broad access is a huge selling point. I suppose it means you're dealing with a standardized system instead of having to have lots of different sort of currency pairs, but lots of different relationships to move money between different currencies and different geographies. A stablecoin sort of enables you to have one infrastructure for everything.

9:44I want to pick up on something you said earlier. You talked about removing friction from payments. And generally, of course, that's a good thing. But on the other hand, there is also fraud, right? And there are times when a little bit of friction is good. How do you think about that balance between, you know, when is a bit of friction a good thing in payments? Yeah. So I think our number one core belief is that we have to be good guardians of the ecosystem. Yeah. Right? Like we want to enable the economy, but we don't want to enable fraud. And so I think you have to do it based on the amount of risk there is.

10:20And so the way I would describe this as there are two primary networks in payments, if you think about it. One is the business network and one is a consumer network. And so the way we think about this is that if there is a consumer that is proven to be a good actor in the system, they should get the most frictionless experience, right? Like let's say you buy on five different sites and you are a great buyer. You never dispute anything. And so like you should get instant access to everything, right? But then if there is a known bad actor, there should be higher friction, right? And I think this is no different than how card networks have implemented 3DS, for example.

11:02So I think it's to do with the fact that you kind of have to match the risk profile and then you also have to match the underlying risk characteristics of a particular payment network. You know, some payment networks are obviously riskier than other payment networks. So you have to match those things and then make sure that you put the appropriate friction in the system. Of course, the greater your scale, the more you can see individual customers, individual businesses, the more risk you can spot. Totally. So coming back to stablecoins, what are some of the barriers that are slowing down adoption of stablecoins?

11:37What are some of the friction points in stablecoin use? Yeah, this is an awesome question. So one is, one really critical barrier is businesses and most businesses don't care about crypto, right? Like they're not building for crypto's sake. They're building because they're solving real problems for their end users. And so the number one barrier is making sure that they don't have to deal with the complexities of crypto. They don't want to care about seed phrases. They don't want to care about wallet securities. They just want to make sure that their use case is served. So I think that's the number one barrier to adoption.

12:14So I'll give you an example. This is actually a perfect example of how Stripe, Bridge and Previz capabilities are used together. So Deal, Deal is a global payroll provider. They are paying 1.5 million contractors worldwide using stable coins. And so on one hand, they need to accept money from the businesses. So they're going to use Stripe for direct debits. then they're going to pay their contractors with stablecoins and they're going to use DUSD, which is a stablecoin that they've built on the bridge platform. And then you need a way for the recipients to receive the money. So they're going to use privy wallets embedded in the deal app so that the recipients can actually receive the money.

12:59So this is a perfect use case of how we've kind of made it super simple for a corporation to actually adopt the technology. I think that's the number one barrier. The second barrier is, I think stable points are great, but stable points need to be really good at interacting with the real world. Yeah. Right? So on the edges. So on-ramps and off-ramps really matter. So if you're sending money out to certain geographies, you have to build the right integrations still in those geographies such that users can off-ramp into the local currency as and when they need it. Yes, because there's lots of people who wouldn't know what to do.

13:37Exactly. If they receive a stable coin, they need to convert into Australian dollars or rupees or whatever. Okay. So, essentially, at Stripe, you're taking away a lot of that complexity and trying to make it easier for businesses to adopt. So, almost trying to enable businesses to use stable coin without having to understand, maybe not understand, but have to deal with any of the complexity.

14:02Which use cases are proving most compelling? I mean, you talked about deal as a really interesting example of sort of paying workers around. You talked about Meta with sort of Colombia and the Philippines. Sometimes people associate particularly cryptocurrencies, but also stable coins with economies that have got maybe capital controls where it's difficult to export money. Countries like Argentina or Zimbabwe with high inflation. Which corridors are you seeing the biggest use cases? I mean, is it actually, you know, U.S. to Europe or is it mostly sort of smaller economies? Where are you seeing that?

14:37So you'd be surprised. We took the example of Felix, for example. Felix is this startup that does remittances on the U.S.-Mexico corridor, which you would call a pretty prime corridor for moving money. It's a pretty big corridor, right. It's actually one of the largest corridors for remittances in the world. and they're able to grow really fast and really quickly and they're doing it on top of stable coins. They're doing it on stable coins. So there is an increasing demand and the use cases that I would describe are if I just have to categorize them. So a simple way to think about it is cross-border money movement.

15:18So I talked about AI companies. So we have companies like X and DigitalOcean that are essentially letting buyers pay with stablecoins. Because again, if you think about it, like in all these geographies that you mentioned, there's actually a demand for people keeping their money in stablecoins because, you know, the currency fluctuations or whatever. And so now if we give them a way to spend that money, that's pretty great. And so the first one is companies being able to accept money from consumers in stablecoins. The second one is payout use case, as I described with Meta. then you can think about the second big use case is you are a company providing financial services.

15:58Can you provide them globally? And I think that's a great way to increase access for more entrepreneurs around the world. And so whether it's ramp increasing, it's where it can provide its financial services or other fintechs building on top of this. I mean, the LATAM market is actually pretty fascinating to look at right now where there are companies getting built just on stable points. You know, like that's the financial building block that they picked from day one to build on top of. So I think the use cases have been kind of awesome to say. Fascinating. Nisika, you've shared some wonderful examples.

16:30It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you here at Stripe Tour today. Thank you so, so much for your time. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for having me. It was a great conversation. Thanks for all the questions. Thank you. Thank you.

16:42That's a fascinating look at how businesses are rethinking money movement, treasury, and stablecoins. After the break, we'll shift our attention to another major transformation, the impact of AI on payments and commerce. We'll be joined by Kevin Miller, Head of Payments, Risk, Support and Global at Stripe, to explore what happens when software starts shopping, buying and transacting on our behalf. Stay with us.

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18:04Welcome back to Fintech Insider Insights, live from Stripe Tour London. For the second half of today's show, I'm delighted to be joined by Kevin Miller, Head of Payments, Risk, Support, and Global at Stripe.

18:19Welcome back to FinTech Insider Insights, live from the Stripe Tour in London. For the second half of this show, I'm delighted to be joined by Kevin Miller, who is Head of Payments, Risk, Support, and Global at Stripe. Kevin, welcome to the show. Delighted to have you. Yeah, glad to be here. That's a big title and a big role. I mean, Head of Payments at one of the world's biggest payments companies. Sounds like quite a big job, right? It is. A big job, yes. So I lead product engineering for kind of our core payments, which includes Agenda Commerce and all of the sort of core, both online and card present and card not present payments.

18:53And then also our radar area with all of the fraud detection capability and support and risk operations generally, as well as global, which is really our horizontal function that focuses on making sure Stripe has great financial infrastructure product in all the countries, all our major markets around the world. That's a lot. It is. What's your current focus? I mean, what are you currently focused on? What are your current priorities? Well, certainly the world is changing with AI. And that's changing both the way we build products and how we build them, what capabilities we have in our products.

19:29And then it's inventing entirely new products for this AI era. So that includes everything with Agenda Commerce. And also serving a lot of our AI startups, we're finding that there's new fraud vectors emerging almost every week. And so Radar, which has really historically been focused on preventing card payment fraud, is now focused on helping doing all of that, protecting a lot more payment methods, but also helping especially AI companies protect against free trial abuse and a whole range of new fraud that is emerging. I often think that fraudsters embrace new technology faster than legitimate businesses.

20:07Very quickly, yes, indeed. How quickly are you seeing some of Stripe's customers embracing agentic commerce? How quickly is this shift? When you were on stage earlier, you were talking about the different modes of agentic commerce. Absolutely. The different roles the agent can be playing in the journey. Yes. What are you seeing happening across your customers? Well, I would say that for a lot of our customers, they recognize that we're in a moment right now where the actual transaction volumes are not mammoth. But I think there's a lot of conviction. We have a lot of conviction and a lot of our customers have conviction now that we are going to be in a world where agents are going to be doing a lot more on our behalf.

20:44We're already seeing that in discovery where agents are popping up. Overnight, websites are seeing a lot more traffic from agents as they're seeking to discover and help people make choices. The agenda commerce volumes are still low, but everyone has conviction, I would say, that they will increase as the right user experiences evolve. And so we're just really helping a lot of household name brands get ready for this kind of shift that's happening. And I think that it's often the case that we expect it to happen very quickly. And usually these things take a little bit more time. But at some point, that shift is going to happen.

21:26Yes, slowly, then suddenly. Right. Slowly and then suddenly is right. And there's a lot of complexity, right? as soon as you shift to an AI agent being involved, particularly given that there are fraudulent bots and fraudulent actors out there, there's a lot of complexity to work through. So it makes sense for firms to start early while the volumes are low to understand how do we make this work? How do we do this safely and effectively? What changes? So from your perspective, Stripe spent years optimizing checkout, optimizing payments for humans. Now we've got AI agents playing different roles in the chain.

22:00What shifts? What are the big things you think about? Well, I think historically a lot of the capability, like our checkout suite, was really built around obviously the human. And so it's really about making a really nice human presentation. And now agents are running around and they need protocols. They don't need shiny pixels. They need things like our shared payment tokens to be able to have secure payment credential transmission or the machine payments protocol that we announced to allow for agent-to-agent transactions in a regulated, you know, by sort of a governed way. And so it's really about developing, I think, protocols that make sense to continue to have, obviously, an open ecosystem of merchants and buyers and agents, but providing some, you know, rules to the road so that these transactions can happen, you know, in a trustworthy way.

22:50One of the really important rules is around sort of liability, right? When you've got people buying things, generally, either the person is genuinely buying something and sometimes they want to return it or whatever, or they have some kind of dispute, or occasionally you've got fraudulent actors. And so you're really trying to distinguish are they fraudulent actors or is this a customer who's made a mistake? Throw agents into the mix and suddenly you've got another actor potentially making mistakes. Absolutely. And the liability gets quite complex at that point, right? My agent bought something I didn't want.