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Stripe Corporate Card
- donalhunt 7y agoUS-only for now...
- simlevesque 7y agojust like almost all of their products in the beginning
- amfeng 7y ago(Amber from Stripe here.) We're definitely planning to expand to other countries—this is just the start.
- ValentineC 7y agoSingapore please! I'm guessing there are plenty of companies targeting the Asian market that are headquartered here, which might hopefully push it a little higher on the priority list. (Happy to chat more about this.)
- ttul 7y agoCanada, s’il vous plait.
- hrdwdmrbl 7y agoCanada PLEASE
- huxflux 7y agoSweden!
- jbverschoor 7y agoStripe is doing some great stuff. But I’d be weary to put all eggs in one basket.
- Scirra_Tom 7y agoTend to agree but I don't think a card is that big of a deal as in this case it's less Stripe owned as it's a Visa card so pretty sure you'd have some additional protection there.
- jbverschoor 7y agoLet’s say you have an issue because stripe suddenly you’re business is fraudulent (read: you got great coverage on HN and suddenly have 1000 extra customers) Stripe flags you and blocks your account. Done. Now your income and money to spend depends on their customer service. Many people have had the same with PayPal, and some with regular banks. So yes, take the card, but also take 5 other cards.
- gzer0 7y agoStripe has been receiving a suspicious amount of praise from HN. Really beginning to wonder if this is all organic at this point. Obviously lots of employees in the comments which they are not hiding that fact. But still makes me want to dig deeper than the surface (as everyone should).
- Silhouette 7y agoStripe almost always receives a lot of praise from HN. That makes perfect sense: it's a YC success story, but more than that, it's a service many of us can relate to, it's a service many of us use or have used ourselves, and probably quite a few of us have been here from its early days and watched it grow. That doesn't mean the near-universal praise is always justified, of course. The Stripe of today is to some extent a victim of its own success, and the clean API, excellent documentation and first rate customer service that it was famous for in its early days are all sadly shadows of their former selves today. That in turn doesn't mean Stripe is bad relative to its competitors, of course. It's just not as good as it used to be.
- 15155 7y agoDepending on how old you are: Stripe occupies a market segment that was previously _extremely_ difficult to access. Authorize.net, merchant acquiring banks, etc. - all of this was _horrible_ for a small, fledgling company.
- Scirra_Tom 7y ago1-2% cashback is highly appealing from here in the UK but shame to see is US only. Anyone shed any light on why getting cashback cards in the UK is rare compared to elswehre? Personally I found Tandem which gives 0.5% cashback which is nice but not much. Business wise we decided to use Amex as the rewards are OKish (comes out to like ~0.5% again I think?) and being able to pay for US services on our USD card is nice and does save money. Benefits overall not great though, probably save ~£1k per year compared to just using a bank issued debit/credit card.
- snaily 7y agoInterchange fees are capped to 0.2-0.3% in the EU by regulation. Merchants pay less (to the issuer, ultimately) for the benefit of accepting credit cards, so there is less fees to hand out as cash back (from the issuer to the card owner).
- jackweirdy 7y agoEuropean interchange fees are capped at 0.3%, so unless you are making money hand over fist from other means, giving back more than 0.5% cashback rarely makes financial sense. Amex own-branded cards are excluded from this as they avoid the three-party relationship that falls under these rules, but some (e.g. airline amex cards) are capped at 0.3% interchange fees. See this article for more info https://www.headforpoints.com/2018/02/08/american-express-european-court-of-justice-interchange-fees/ https://www.headforpoints.com/2018/02/08/american-express-eu...
- gringoDan 7y agoCredit card transaction fees are way higher in the US than in the UK. This allows the companies budget for much higher cashback earning, mileage programs, etc. Here is a great post that explains the economics of credit card rewards: https://www.reddit.com/r/churning/comments/5oucdq/the_economics_of_churning_who_pays_for_the_rewards/ https://www.reddit.com/r/churning/comments/5oucdq/the_econom...
- tialaramex 7y agoAs I understand it usual US de-regulation means card issuers get to charge the merchant more or less whatever they want. So if they charge your grocery store $4 for the transaction when a rival does it for $1 then giving you $2 "cash back" is very affordable for them.
- seibelj 7y agoDirect attack on Brex, good to see competition.
- xtracto 7y agoAlso on TeamPay.
- julianozen 7y agoDoes anyone know how similar this is to Brex? Related: what make Brex so special as a credit card for startups?
- mikedouglas 7y agoBrex differentiated itself by using your bank history to determine your credit limit, meaning that founders didn't need to personally guarantee their corporate cards early on in a company's life. It seems like Stripe is doing something similar.
- vertoc 7y agoMy guess is that Brex is more geared towards Silicon Valley VC funded startups - they look at how much money you have in your bank when setting your credit limit (it’s essentially a charge card if I’m using the terminology right - your credit limit is basically what’s in your bank account). The rewards are also more appealing than this iteration of the Stripe corporate card - 7x rideshare, 4x travel, 3x restaurants. Again, my guess is that Stripe is aimed to businesses that don’t fall into the traditional VC startup model - but maybe the rewards will become enticing enough that they will be competitive with Brex in that area in the future as well. You also can’t discount Stripe’s Connect API - could see this being used in tandem with that for some interesting ideas Edit: taking a closer look - they also integrate into services like Expensify and if you use their card, first $50k of payment processing is free so that’s also interesting. If you’re paying sticker price, that comes out to something like $1500
- jakelazaroff 7y agoOn top of the more normal percentage cash back, the partner benefits (like 5% off DigitalOcean) make this really appealing. Potentially interesting wrinkle: you're not allowed to carry a balance (from https://stripe.com/docs/corporate-card/faqs https://stripe.com/docs/corporate-card/faqs).
- desigooner 7y agoit's basically a charge card.
- astura 7y ago>you're not allowed to carry a balance This type of card is called a "charge card" (not "credit card") and is extremely common in business card land. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_card AMEX's best known cards are charge cards as well - Green, Gold, Platinum.
- clementmas 7y agoWould the money be taken directly from the Stripe balance or the linked bank account?
- amfeng 7y agoRight now, you pay through a linked bank account. We are planning to let you pay from your balance in the future, though. (Most of our early users preferred the former.)
- AlexMuir 7y agoThis is going to be an absolutely massive business. I wouldn’t be surprised if in five years it’s bigger than payment processing.
- ttcbj 7y agoWell, 2% on some things + 1% on everything else is better than I am getting with Amex now. Plus, $50k in free processing is like $1,450 in free money. Honestly, I wouldn't believe that deal, except that I have a multi-year history with stripe as our CC processor and it has been nothing but positive and as-promised. So, I submitted an application. It sounds like a great deal to me.
- kuu 7y agoYour message couldn't look more as a PR comment. Maybe it's true, but it feels like an ad.
- ttul 7y agoI’d say the same thing. I’m not a shill. Have processed millions with Stripe and there has never been a glitch.
- gzer0 7y agoI kind of have to agree. Not saying it is false or denying the actual premise of the OP. Just saying it feels personally to ME, very PR like and included for those reasons alone as a top comment here on HN.
- anthonybsd 7y agoUghh, almost every card for individuals with good credit is better than that [1]. Unless you mean strictly among corporate cards? [1] https://www.nerdwallet.com/best/credit-cards/cash-back https://www.nerdwallet.com/best/credit-cards/cash-back
- privateSFacct 7y agoDo these cards require a personal guarantee? Do they require personal social security number? Can they be ordered in bulk (ie, 5-10 at a time when onboarding folks). Not to be rude, but the corporate card market is different than the personal card market in a number of ways.
- brettcvz 7y agoIt’s impressive to see the velocity of new products that Stripe is putting out. I’d be really interested to see a blog post or similar on how they decide which initiatives to invest in, how they structure those teams and set milestones, etc
- pc 7y ago[Stripe cofounder] Thanks! We're always paranoid that we're too slow, for whatever it's worth. We're still iterating on the supporting models and frameworks. We think a lot about pace layering -- how do we have teams that think on multi-year horizons (infrastructure, security, etc.) alongside teams that are rapidly iterating at much earlier stages of development. I think a lot goes wrong when organizations insist on too much consistency in their operating approach. We've now identified a few semi-formal mechanisms that have helped substantially. (For example: larger companies tend to want to aggressively standardize roles. This makes sense when operating at scale but less so in the early days. So, we've made it easy to hire for ill-defined roles in nascent product areas -- we figure we can codify those roles later as needed and that doing so sooner is a premature optimization.) We'd certainly consider writing a blog post once we feel that they might be generalizable. (If anyone reading this is interested in helping us figure things out, please do apply. We're particularly interested in hiring engineers who are interested in these questions.)
- swampthinker 7y agoHey Patrick, could you elaborate more on hiring in nascent product areas? What does making it easier actually entail compared to hiring in more established areas of Stripe?
- brettcvz 7y agoMakes sense! For the eventual blog post, I'd be particularly interested in hearing how you decide which small bets to make (e.g. did Corporate Cards start from an employee saying "I want to go work on this"? An internal new-products strategy team? An executive?), and what structures you have in place for deciding when to invest more heavily in a bet. We are trying to figure out how to do this at Clever, and I know others like Segment (https://segment.com/blog/finding-product-market-fit-again/ https://segment.com/blog/finding-product-market-fit-again/) are thinking about this as well, so hopefully we can start putting together some advice on how to create an "engine" for layering new products onto an established platform.
- AlphaWeaver 7y agoThe thing that sticks out to me as a core differentiator here is the "real-time expense reporting" feature. It looks like it allows employees to SMS a receipt the moment they make a transaction and it'll automatically match it. That's a marked improvement compared to how serious of a pain point expense reporting is for so many employees.
- DanFeldman 7y agoFWIW, Brex also offers this. I use my corporate card and immediately get a text reminding me to snap a picture of the transaction. However, it almost never correctly identifies the transaction on the card and pings me immediately with another text "Could not match a transaction". I usually just ignore that though.
- fro0116 7y agoThey have an app now, works much better than the text receipt feature in my experience so far: https://brex.com/mobile/ https://brex.com/mobile/
- hosiukeung 7y agoAnd remember that Stripe just launched Stripe Capital (https://stripe.com/capital https://stripe.com/capital) last week to offer lending services, I cannot wait to see these new services to launch outside US.
- 19ylram49 7y agoWas there a HN thread for Stripe Capital?
- kevinbowman 7y agoYep, 4 days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20888817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20888817
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Liron 7y agoNow Brex has to up their UI/UX game
- Fillsev 7y agoМне кажется это абсолютно!!!чистая правда
- philip1209 7y agoOur company Moonlight was an early beta tester of the Stripe Corporate Card. Each person on our distributed team of five has a card, and it's made things like arranging travel or covering minor SaaS charges simple. Happy to answer any questions about the end user experience!
- amfeng 7y agoWe love working with you. <3
- philip1209 7y agoThanks for listening to and acting on our feedback!
- athyuttamre 7y agoThank you for being such amazing beta testers! Glad to have started with Checkout, met in the TOMS store in LA, and now on Corporate Card. :)
- philip1209 7y agoI'll be at Sessions today if you want to catch up!
- athyuttamre 7y agoUnfortunately will be watching live from the office, but you should say hi to Cristina!
- hkchad 7y agoIs this card tied to an individual or the company? We use Amex and it's tied to individuals so when that person leaves we have to do the dance of migrating the payment to another person. Can we avoid that w/ stripe?
- 7y ago
- jblake 7y agoAs a small business owner, what I like about the Chase business cards is rewards come back in the form of points that I can easily transfer to my personal cards. It sounds like Stripe applies them towards the statement, i.e., benefit goes to the business, not to me personally. However, the 50k free processing is very enticing as thats way higher than any other signup bonus I've seen. But again, credit goes to business, not to me. With a typical chase card, I'll get ~$1,000 worth of points (tax free) added directly to my personal points balance for simply switching a few business expenses to that new card for a couple of months.
- icebraining 7y agoI never had a corporate CC, so I'm curious: do those rewards count as personal income for tax purposes?
- jblake 7y agoUsually I'll let the points sit and use them when I have to travel - so the points never touch my bank accounts. I'm not a tax expert, but for that reason I don't bother reporting any income on it
- sdinsn 7y agoIf you use it for personal travel, I'm pretty sure it counts as income.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoIt does not in the US: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/a-02-18.pdf https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/a-02-18.pdf
- sdinsn 7y agoI stand corrected, thanks
- 7y ago
- ccjnsn 7y agoStripe want to be a fullstack business bank. Stripe Payments. Stripe Capital. Now a card. I welcome it, business banking is huge and needs pushed forward!
- hoffmann530 7y agoThis is the second time Stripe has been at the top of HN in the last week. Any theories on why? Is this really that novel of a business?
- mises 7y agoBecause stripe is essentially in the business of fixing broken, old stuff in the payment business. It made a really good core product that developers love, then branched out to other payment-related products and applied that same excellence to those products, too. It is user-friendly, has helpful support, and can be easily integrated. In short, it solves real problems without making itself one more head-ache for people.
- simplecomplex 7y agoStripe was first to market with a simple payments API. It established their brand. But I don’t think anything else they’ve done is different than the status quo. Getting a credit card, loan, or incorporated is more or less the same at Stripe vs elsewhere.
- allenu 7y agoI had to look it up, but Stripe got Y Combinator funding, so that's likely it. I was also confused about why it comes up so often here.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ztratar 7y agoIt's because we had our conference this week and chose to launch a lot of new stuff. :)
- 401kguy 7y agoIf you watch Kat's recent "How to Launch (Again and Again)" talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xU050kMbHM&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xU050kMbHM&feature=youtu.be Stripe YC S2010 gets cited as often doing it right with launches across all social channels including Hacker News, with the founders jumping into the threads to answer questions.
- Szalloony 7y agoNice
- aquark 7y agoNice, I assume this give Stripe the ability to shortcircuit Visa/MC on a payment between a Stripe card and Stripe as the processor and capture more of the revenue without needing to share it.
- bdcravens 7y agoVisa/MC is the payment network; cards like Stripe run atop it. (Just as Stripe relies on that network for its transaction processing) This product is more of a direct competitor to American Express.
- grey-area 7y agoYep, Stripe are also investors in Monzo. This is the obvious long term play and there is no way the incumbents can keep up. It would also allow massive innovation in payments too. Visa and mastercard should be very worried about being displaced.
- dbbk 7y agoHow is Monzo related? They’re still a bank and still use MasterCard.
- Nextgrid 7y agoWhen a Monzo card is processed by Stripe they can cut-out the middleman (MasterCard) and directly settle the payment between themselves.
- bdcravens 7y agoI assume that represents a very tiny % of their transactions.
- grey-area 7y agoOf course it does today. If you fast forward a few years and include this new stripe card it may not and as they own both ends of the transaction they could start to offer better features on transactions that don’t leave their network, incentivising both sides to use it.
- woodhull 7y agoHow do the Partner Benefits work? Are they only valid if we are not an existing customer of the partner, or is it for any spend with those vendors we put onto the card? Do we work with the Partner to get that discount or is it automatically applied on the Stripe side while processing charges we make to the card?
- throw03172019 7y agoI’m fairly certain that a majority of the “X months free” offers are for new customers only. I’m not sure about the AWS credits. Has anyone ever stacked them? (I’m sure AWS locks us to one per account since it goes through a review process)
- amfeng 7y ago(Amber from Stripe here. For folks following along, we're talking about the "Additional Benefits" section on the page.) Anything that says "cash back" is automatically applied to your card spending and for both new and existing customers. For everything else, we'll give you a discount code to type into the partner's site directly!
- graeme 7y agoDo you need to be incorporated to use this, or can a non-incorporated business use it? The fee rebate and partner credits are very compelling.
- amfeng 7y agoYour business doesn't need to be incorporated to apply. Sole props are welcome! It's worth noting that the personal liability changes, though: the individual behind the sole prop will be personally responsible for charges on their account.
- fortran77 7y agoPlus you can carry it in your wallet or your pocket.
- alexpowerplay 7y agoso good
- freediver 7y agoI wonder what would it take for the user (company) to choose the materials of the card (like wood etc)?
- jasoncornwall 7y agoI'm not sure if this has been mentioned, but the response to the invite request currently has a typo. It says "We've received your invite request and we'll be touch soon." Instead of "we'll be in touch soon." Just an fyi.
- amfeng 7y agoThank you! Fixed. (:
- mildmustard 7y agoapple card...
- Idalicio 7y agoweell
- herostratus101 7y agoWait, let me get this straight. You get $5000 of AWS Credits that don't expire and don't require any minimum level of spending by signing up for this card?
- ruffrey 7y agoCan anyone from Stripe confirm how the AWS Credits will work? If it's good, this seems like a no-brainer for most SaaS startups.
- Dunedan 7y agoFrom the Terms of AWS Promotional Credits: > 10. Promotional Credit is valid for a limited time only and expires on the > date indicated when you receive the applicable Promotional Credit code (or > such other date designated by us or in these Terms). Failure to use > Promotional Credit before its expiration date will result in its forfeiture. > We reserve the right to cancel Promotional Credit at any time. No refunds > will be granted for any expired or cancelled Promotional Credit. https://aws.amazon.com/awscredits/ https://aws.amazon.com/awscredits/
- amfeng 7y agoHi there! There is no minimum spend requirement to take advantage of the AWS credits. They are promotional credits and will eventually expire; see Amazon's terms: https://aws.amazon.com/awscredits/ https://aws.amazon.com/awscredits/.
- miguelmota 7y ago
- rolltiide 7y agoOh nice a competitor to Brex! Brex is also only charge cards so you have to pay them off every 30 days or in other boutique arrangements where the default is not carrying a balance.
- adamin1i 7y agothanks for this info
- belthesar 7y agoThe spending controls look attractive to me. I have an org that might be a good candidate, as we have several teams that need to manage expenses. Historically, we've used business pre-paid debit cards to control maximum spending, with individual authorizations managing how much folks can spend. It's okay, but it doesn't scale well. Regarding the controls on the Stripe cards, do they have a concept for Roles? I'd like to be able to say "Managers have a monthly/yearly spending authority up to X, and Directors have a spending authority up to Y", and as we onboard new folks, to put them into a role to manage that quickly and easily.
- amfeng 7y agoWe love the idea of having roles for spending controls. It's not currently part of the product, but we're planning to work on this very soon!
- martymacfly 7y agoThx for this info
- nsedlet 7y agoI wonder why companies prefer to use a corporate credit card over debit cards (which are very easy to get)? Do they just like having the line of credit? Is it really worth the extra complication/hassle/thing to worry about just to push off payments by ~15 days (Stripe seems to require that the balance be paid off each month)? I also wonder how that is enforced (by reducing credit limits as a company's bank balance starts to decrease, or by charging interest, or by just eating the defaults)? Or is it about managing/reporting expenses better across groups an organization? Or do companies just like the rewards? I understand that interchange fees are higher for credit cards - so are corporate credit cards basically a way to extract additional fees from merchants and distribute them in the form of rewards/cash back to the cardholders?
- graeme 7y agoIt can be up to 55 days free, as payment is due ~20 days after statement. For debit, you would need a bank account for each employee/team and keep them funded. Credit cards let you make employee cards with set limits. You also get stuff like chargeback protection and whatever else comes with the card. Amex tends to have various insurances for example. Note that I don't work in a corp, am just thinking through what debit would require. This is one of amex's corp cards: https://www.americanexpress.com/us/credit-cards/business/corporate-credit-cards/american-express-platinum-corporate-card?intlink=US-Acq-GCP-CorporateCards-ViewAllCards-CardArt-PlatinumCard https://www.americanexpress.com/us/credit-cards/business/cor...
- ThrustVectoring 7y agoI believe it's a matter of internal controls. Debit cards are typically allowed to do more things than credit cards, especially if you disable cash advances on the credit card.
- jpalomaki 7y agoI’ve been dreaming of corporate card that would also collect the PDF receipts from vendors. Here the credit card statement is not enough for accounting, you need to have detailed receipt for each charge. Hunting these every month for various SaaS services and other purchases takes time. And it’s not easy to outsource since in many cases the billing stuff is only visible to service admin.
- philip1209 7y agoMy personal amex seems to be collecting Square receipts on the dashboard automatically!
- amfeng 7y agoWe're working on it! (;
- elorant 7y agoI hope this will be gradually available outside US too.
- ngngngng 7y agoHow is this different from Divvy?
- taurath 7y agoThis looks great. The integrations to finance software already built in are killer. The spend controls and categorization are the most interesting part - will it be possible to reduce the amount of overall credit you need to get? With Amex you have to have a full sized limit available for each employee with a card. If this pulls from the same pool and respects spending limits, it could allow you to have a lot more flexibility with your credit as a business. Consistently impressive stuff from Stripe.
- juped 7y agoThis doesn't seem that compelling compared to Amex Plum, to me. Signup bonuses are alright but nothing startups aren't showered in from all sources already.
- H8crilA 7y agoI'm worried about the proliferation revenue-based credit in Silicon Valley. Traditionally credit needs one of the following (ideally two): 1) established history of profit, not just revenue, and 2) collateral. How else are you supposed to convince creditors that you have the capability of paying it back? Stripe Capital, Brex just look at revenue streams. Easy credit is an obvious predictor of trouble. 2008 to bring a memorable example. Anyone here has plans for shorting corporate credit? Best I could come up with is LEAPS puts on $BKLN. I'm holding some small amount, will double down if things start going south. Wish I could short the revenue-based Silicon Valley style credit. That one is quite ridiculous.
- cloudytoday 7y agointeresting move....they are like a whole new financial system where millions / billions of $$ are flowing from all the online/app transactions to the new financing thing they did and not the card...
- boltzmannbrain 7y agoBrex user here. Anyone run a direct comparison of the benefits (cash back, partner deals)?
- cyberferret 7y agoAnyone know of a similar card on offer for Australian startup founders? I see a plethora of these types of cards hitting the market lately, but nearly all for the US market only (understandably, given the strict banking rules in each country).
- pypypypypypy 7y agoHey, I work at DiviPay where we are trying to solve these kinds of problems for Australian businesses. Shout us a message at https://divipay.com/ https://divipay.com/ and someone will be in touch to help you and your startup out.
- gnicholas 7y agoI'd be curious to know if the AWS credits are available to people who have used AWS before, or had AWS credits before. In my experience, once you're a customer, they won't let you use any more credits (regardless of size, or how many/few credits you used the first time around).
- deepGem 7y agoJust the real time expense reporting is a reason strong enough to get this card. Even with expensify and all expensing tools out there, the friction for reimbursements is still very high. This card removes that friction. Essentially, I just spend and upload my receipts. No need to reconciliate transactions, create an expense report, submit that etc. If only this integrated directly with LDAP or something like that to automate the approval workflow.
- icelancer 7y ago>> real time expense reporting Agreed. This is huge if they get it right. Definitely going to sign up for the trial.