Stripe is promising to help subscription and SaaS companies in Europe get paid faster, and ensure compliance with new authentication rules, through the introduction of its recurring billing product.
The subscription e-commerce market has grown more than 100% over the past five years, with Europe outpacing the US.
Stripe says its Billing product help businesses get paid faster and increase revenue. Instead of manually retrying cards, Stripe Billing’s smart retries use machine learning to figure out the best time to retry failed cards.
In the US, where Stripe Billing launched last year and is used by Slack and Meetup among others, smart retries have led, on average, to a seven per cent lift in recovered revenue.
Billing also automatically generates invoices on business' behalf. Instead of being static bills, Stripe’s hosted invoices are interactive payment pages, making it easy for customers to submit a payment instantly, without even opening a new browser tab.
As it launches the product in Europe, Stripe is also stressing that Billing helps subscription firms meet upcoming Strong Consumer Authentication (SCA) rules.
From September, the SCA regulation under PSD2 will mean that European shoppers will have to authenticate online payments over EUR30 with two of the following: something they know (like a password), are (fingerprint/face ID), or have (phone).
Stripe says its product will help subscription firms automatically identify precisely which charges require SCA and send customisable emails to subscribers when additional authentication is needed, reducing customer attrition and revenue loss.
Finally, Stripe Billing includes support for VAT across the EU.
Tara Seshan, product manager, Stripe Billing, says: "With Stripe Billing, companies of all sizes now have access to advanced invoicing tools that will also help them comply with SCA and VAT requirements. We’re excited to power the next generation of European subscription companies as we continue building the economic infrastructure that will grow the GDP of the internet."