I am in Australia so have to watch from afar, but I am really keen to see exactly how Stripe operates. As far as I can work out (I obviously don't have a login

I am in Australia so have to watch from afar, but I am really keen to see exactly how Stripe operates. As far as I can work out (I obviously don't have a login) part of what will make them brilliant is they enable you to accept payments in minutes, I.e don't require you to hold a merchant account / create one for you. Is this correct? Keen to know more as PayPal are really the only other service that do this and their increasingly difficult fraud protection barriers must be a result of the complexity of managing such a service.