Stripe Reports Total Payment Volume Rose 25%, Topping $1 Trillion

Stripe surpassed $1 trillion in total payment volume in 2023.

That milestone marked a 25% increase from the previous year and meant that businesses running on Stripe accounted for about 1% of global gross domestic product (GDP), Stripe co-founders Patrick Collison and John Collison wrote in the company’s 2023 annual letter.

“Stripe was robustly cash flow positive in 2023 and expects to be again in 2024,” they wrote in the letter. “This threshold is important, because it allows us to invest for the long term, building what we believe our users need 10 years from now, without regard for the natural volatility of capital markets.”

During 2023, Stripe continued to add optimizations to its optimized checkout suite, aiming to eliminate any barriers to online purchases, the letter said.

For example, the firm added pre-built payment surfaces and flexible user interface (UI) components to facilitate high-converting flows; added support for more than 50 new payment methods; shaved time off its Payments Links’ render time; and reduced the odds of errant declines by cardholders’ banks, per the letter.

“Online payments is, among other things, a conversion optimization problem,” Stripe’s co-founders wrote in the letter. They added: “Even the smallest tweak to fine-tune the checkout experience benefits from Stripe’s economies of scale, since we can amortize the fixed costs of complex improvements across more than a trillion dollars of transactions.”

In the past year, Stripe also continued to refine its Revenue and Financial Automation (RFA) suite that brings together billing, tax, revenue recognition and other capabilities, according to the letter. While the RFA suite started with billing systems, it has grown to include additional automation.

The latest additions to the RFA suite include multiprocessor support for taxes, no-code revenue recovery automations, and subscription schedules, per the letter.

“If you build your billing infrastructure the right way, you can achieve the triple benefits of reducing your operating costs, growing revenue faster and providing a better customer experience,” the letter said.

In another recent development, it was reported Feb. 28 that Stripe’s value reached $65 billion following a share deal with employees. In that deal, Stripe and some of its investors will purchase more than $1 billion in stock from current and former employees.