Stripe Australia-New Zealand MD Karl Durrance: "The general assumption that New Zealand is the same as Australia is not correct".
Payment processing giant Stripe has put its first boots on Kiwi ground, with Ben Hanna named its first New Zealand country head. Hanna was formerly vice-president, global sales, for AI avatar firm Soul Machines.
It’s just the start of a push to expand its presence here, says Australia-New Zealand manager director Karl Durrance.
“New Zealand’s an important part of our business. We’ve got some incredible customers over there. Xero is one of the flagships,” Durrance told the Herald at his firm’s Stripe Tour Sydney event.
“Hiring Ben is a deliberate, thoughtful moment where we want to manage New Zealand as an independent country and get a lot closer to the market and get a deeper understanding of what the needs are,” the MD said.
“Because I think the general assumption that it’s the same as Australia is not correct. So this is going to give us a chance to get that level of fidelity so that we can invest in New Zealand in a different way to meet the needs of merchants there.”
Stripe, founded by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison in 2010, entered the Australian market in 2014.
Patrick Collison (the older by two years at 36), who was in Sydney for the event, said his firm number of Australian customers had grown from a few dozen to 500,000 since then - making Australia-New Zealand the firm’s third-largest market outside the US.
Using Stripe Billing to manage subscriptions has been a grow area recently. Collison said Australian streaming service Stan had just signed up to the platform, now used by around 300,000 companies worldwide.
Stripe does not break out its New Zealand customer numbers, but Durrance says there has been a 40% increase in the raw volume of transactions through Stripe’s systems over the past year.
And New Zealand operation’s annual filings show its partnerships with the likes of Xero, MYOB, Shopify, Instacart, Google and Amazon, among others, have seen consistently growing revenue on this side of the Tasman - with the constant upward trajectory notable given the hangover many players in the sector experienced as the lockdown era online shopping boom subsided.
“The other very interesting statistic about New Zealand is that 40% of our customers in New Zealand, from a volume perspective, are doing cross-border [selling]. That’s way higher than Australia. Australia’s about 30%. And Australia is way higher than the rest of the world,” Durrance said.
Selling online helps Kiwi companies defeat the tyranny of geography - but it can be a headache for bill payments once you start transacting with customers in multiple countries, including where credit cards are not the norm. Stripe pitches its support for multiple types of payment, and the ability to easily set things up so people can pay for New Zealand goods in their local currency (with adaptive, real-time conversion) - an option Stripe says lifts sales by an average 11.9%.
But if your audience doesn’t extend beyond your local farmer’s market, Stripe has also moved into sales terminals and Tap to Pay for Apple and iPhone phones – so a customer only has to tap their card or digital wallet to your smartphone to make a payment, no extra hardware required.
The full platform comes with some robust pay-as-you pricing for Stripe’s NZ customers (2.7% +30c for processing domestic card payments and 3.7% + 30c for international) but no setup costs or monthly fees.
Collison said, “With international transactions, we ourselves incur an awful lot of costs, whether it’s with FX [foreign exchange], or with other payment methods or fraud prevention.”
Patrick Collison also used Stripe Tour Sydney to show off a new A/B testing tool (that is, trying out two or more different ways of selling to two or more slices of your traffic). While A/B testing is nothing new, Collison billed Stripe’s iteration as quick and easy for non-technical people to set up. He used the example of road-testing the appeal of a buy-no, pay-later (BNPL) option at different price points. A/B testing can be applied to 1 of a site’s traffic, or 50% or more.
The way we buy things has also changed since 2014. In Australia, cash has gone from being used in over 50% of transactions to under 13%.
Here, the number of Kiwis “using cash for everyday purposes” was “57.2% in 2023, a significant decline from 60.4% in 2021, and 95.8% in 2019″, the Reserve Bank said in its Cash Use Survey 2023 report, which caught a big shift during the pre- and post-pandemic eras.
In 2023, only 8.3% of New Zealanders had used cash at least once in the past seven days, according to RBNZ’s survey.
Stripe has also recently launched a key service on this side of the Tasman: Bulk Electronic Clearing System (BECS) direct debit payments for businesses.
It is used for most payments in Australia and New Zealand that fall outside Eftpos or credit card payments.
In New Zealand, the rise of subscription services such as streaming platforms, meal kits, and software-as-a-service (Saas) products, has fueled demand for Stripe to launch BECS direct debit, Durrance said.
This speeds up the payment process by debiting customers’ bank accounts directly, lowering transaction costs and avoiding churn caused by failed payment cards. It’s the first time that BECS will be available as a payment method on Stripe for subscriptions in New Zealand.
“Xero’s decade-long partnership with Stripe is built on a foundation of helping small businesses get paid faster and maintain a healthy cash flow. Stripe’s extensive payment method support allows us to cater to the diverse needs of our customers in Australia and New Zealand and grow our subscription-based services with confidence by offering platform billing methods like NZ BECS direct debit,” said Xero payments and ecosystems head Bharathi Ramavarjula.
The Collison brothers grew up in a small village in County Tipperary.
“You’re an eight-year-old kid reading this magazine with all these cool offers, thinking ‘I want to order the such and such.’ But in the small print it says ‘offer not valid in the Republic of Ireland. It gave us some sense of the value of that last mile,” Patrick Collison said at a media briefing in Sydney.
They founded their first startup Automatic - a tool for selling on eBay - when Patrick was 19 and John 17 - then sold it 10 months later for US$5m ($8m) in 2008.
Their early e-commerce experiences left them thinking online payment processing was lacking, so they decided to build their own – Stripe – in 2010.
The startup received US$2m from backers including PayPal co-founders Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and A-list Silicon Valley venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz in 2010.
Today, Stripe has a private equity valuation of around US$70 billion - making it one of the most valuable tech companies that’s yet to list, making it the subject of endless IPO speculation.
Is Patrick starting to get the itch to cash in, after 14 years?
“We’re really happy with the current status of the business,” Collison told a media briefing in Sydney.
“Our focus is very much on our customers and what they want and how we can serve them better.
“If at some point we think an IPO will help us build better products, then we’ll consider it. We’re very much optimising for customers, not corporate structure or shareholder returns.”
I didn’t move to the US until I was going to university,” Patrick Collison said.
“Back in the 50s and 60s, Ireland was the poor man of Europe. Through the 80s, 90s and 2000s, we saw the Celtic Tiger and a complete transformation in Irish livelihoods. Ireland became one of the most prosperous countries in Europe. You can’t help but internalise the importance of that when you grew up in the midst of it.”
That’s informed his worldview.
“Our mission is to grow the GDP of the internet and that’s kind of an abstract idea, and certainly not the world’s catchiest slogan. But we do think that there’s not enough prosperity in the world. The average global income is on the order of $10,000 a year.”
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
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