Stripe – the $95 billion payments giant – is in a product sprint to expand its services and functionality beyond the basic payments that are at the core of its business today. Today, the company took the wraps of Data Pipeline, an infrastructure product that allows users to create links between their Stripe transaction data and data stores they hold in Amazon Redshift or Snowflake’s Data Cloud.
The move underscores how Stripe is positioning itself as more than just a payment provider, but as a greater powerhouse for financial services and data, a “financial infrastructure platform for businesses” in its own words.
The launch comes just weeks after the company announced Financial Connections, which allows Stripe customers to connect with their customer banking services to retrieve more complete financial data about those users.
Data Pipeline – which has been operating in closed beta thus far – has already picked up a few early customers: ChowNow, Housecall Pro, HubSpot, Lime, Shipt and Zoom, which Stripe said they are using to “automate downstream reporting and identify growth opportunities.” In other words, payments are still taking place, but now Stripe turns the payment data result into its own profit center.
The product allows users to more comprehensively and easily integrate Stripe’s financial data with other business intelligence, enabling those users to use that data in broader business intelligence efforts, as well as financial reporting and monitoring business activities for fraud, security vulnerabilities, and security issues. Lake.
This is notable because Stripe is launching an infrastructure product, particularly in the field of ETL (extract, transform, load), which it has built internally from the ground up, with the aim of replacing third-party products for its users. However, it’s not the company’s first product to focus on the broader field of enterprise analytics: in 2017, the company launched Sigma, a payment tracking tool.
“While Sigma gives you access to your Stripe data in the Stripe Dashboard, Data Pipeline gives you access to your Stripe data directly into your Snowflake or Amazon Redshift data warehouse,” said Vladi Shunturov, product leader at Stripe, in an emailed interview. †In this way, Data Pipeline makes it easier to manage your Stripe data in combination with your other company data.”
Snowflake and Amazon work with other third-party ETL providers and Stripe declined to comment on any financial arrangements with these particular partnerships. It also declined to comment on whether it would add other data warehouse providers to that list.
“We are always considering ways to expand our services and better serve our users, but have no specific plans to share at this time,” said Shunturov.†
With the Amazon and Snowflake integrations, Stripe teamed up with the two to use their respective data-sharing technologies to build its product, he said. specifically, Stripe initiates a data exchange that allows us to store the user’s data Stripe data in the Stripe cluster and we then give the user read access to this data. “This way the user can access their data without giving write access to their cluster,” he said. “We are committed to continuously improving data freshness and expanding the breadth of business-ready reports and metrics. To achieve this, we had to build this capability natively on Stripe.”
Shunturov added that the impetus for the product, and perhaps the company’s strategic roadmap for how to build this new wave of services in general, comes from user requests.
†Stripe users, especially larger users, have been calling for easier ways to not just use their . exportable, but also continuously synchronized Stripe data to their data warehouse, so they can Stripe data with other business data without having to build or maintain an API integration yourself,” he said. “By making reports and metrics available at the product level, we also significantly reduce the data engineering investment our users must make to turn raw data into business insights. Snowflake and Amazon Redshift were selected as our first launch partners due to high user demand. In fact, both were the most widely used data warehouses among the Stripe user community.”
Data Pipeline is currently only in the US, for Stripe users who also use Amazon Redshift or Snowflake’s Data Cloud.
