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Stripe CEO Patrick Collison on Why Payments Infrastructure Is the Place to Be (Full Video)

As Stripe helps its partners expand the online payments pie, it wants a teensy slice.

Asa Mathat

Stripe’s Patrick Collison is a rising-tide kind of guy.

Only two percent of all global consumer spending happens online, he says. If Stripe can provide payments infrastructure services to the companies that help grow that total to, say, five percent or 10 percent, it can be a really big deal.

And Stripe just so happens to exist at a time when mobile phones are bringing the people of the world online, connected and ready to pay for things.

“Ten to 15 years ago, any payments company was competing on the basis of its payments connectivity and proprietary relationships with different back-end systems,” Collison said at our recent Code/Mobile conference. “Because of mobile, because of these new Internet giants, the problems these companies are trying to solve are technology problems.”

And Stripe, of course, is a technology company.

Today, Stripe is a partner of Apple, Alibaba and Twitter, helping power their online payments systems, as well as those of many up-and-coming startups.

Collison said he believes that Apple Pay’s tokenization scheme is a vast security improvement on traditional credit-card processing. And based on early data — and the fact that scary, well-publicized credit-card breaches will continue to happen — he thinks this type of security model is the way of the future.

And Stripe would like its 2.9 percent plus 30 cents of each transaction, please.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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