Stripe, the €18bn online payments company founded by Limerick brothers Patrick and John Collison, is launching a new payments card.
The company, which now employs 2,000 people, has also announced expansion into eight new EU countries and appointed Irishwoman Eileen O’Meara, former vice- president at Salesforce, as its new EMEA revenue boss.
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The move comes after the company, whose Dublin engineering office employs almost 300 people, announced it would start lending money to small businesses.
The eight new countries in the Stripe rollout are Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Greece and Portugal.
“This expansion is heavily driven from the Dublin office, which is Stripe’s fastest-growing office and first international engineering hub,” said a spokesman for Stripe.
Ms O’Meara, the company’s new head of revenue and growth, was previously a senior vice-president for international marketing with Salesforce and is an NUIG graduate.
Stripe is an online payments system that lets online stores accept payments through ordinary means, such as credit cards, without any special measures being taken. The success of the system is attributed to the relative ease by which it can be installed by website creators setting up a company’s online shop.
Stripe’s business model is to take a small cut of the transaction. In Europe, it is 1.4pc plus 25c for European cards or a little more for non-European cards from those using it to sell. But it is Stripe’s scale which is now its strength.
In addition to accepting payments, companies can use Stripe to handle accounting, billing, paying out to third parties and optimising for mobile payments. Stripe users also get access to mobile wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay.
“Central and Eastern Europe has a lot of entrepreneurial and technological talent and we believe even more of its companies could be expanding globally,” said Felix Huber, head of Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa at Stripe.
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