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Good afternoon. Welcome to "Managing money at scale: treasury as a feature,
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not a department." I'm Leland Roger and I'm the treasurer here at Stripe.
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And when I joined Stripe's Treasury team nearly nine years ago,
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some of the first questions I asked myself on day one were,
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"Where's my cash right now? What's my FX exposure?
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Which of my entities have money and which of them need it?" And
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if you've ever asked yourself any of those questions,
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and I'm guessing many of you have, then this talk is for you.
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Here's what we'll cover today: first,
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we'll discuss what going global actually means and why it's harder than most
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people think. Second,
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we'll share how we virtualize treasury management at Stripe. Third,
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how we turn that into a product that you can use. And fourth,
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how stablecoins fit into the picture. Following that,
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we'll hear from two Stripe users, Replit and Mercor.
But first,
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let's start with the problem.
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The first thing to understand is that going global doesn't mean what it used to.
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When I joined in 2017,
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Stripe processed 78 billion in total payments volume for mostly the US and EMEA
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markets. Last year,
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that number was 1.9 trillion or 25 times growth since 2017.
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Today, we operate across over 45 markets, dozens of currencies,
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and over 125 payment methods. That growth didn't happen overnight,
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but the shift it reflects is real.
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Digital native companies and AI platforms are now global from Day 1.
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They don't just sell in one market.
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They have complex multidirectional flows from the moment they launch.
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For most of you, treasury and finance isn't your core product.
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And that's exactly why this matters. To operate a global business,
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you need three core money management capabilities to accept funds,
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to store funds,
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and to send funds.
Traditional banking systems work well for a domestic
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hub-and-spoke model, not a global mesh network world.
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To replicate Stripe's reach today, you'd face the N-squared problem:
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needing a separate integration for every country and currency pair.
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Imagine you operate in 10 countries and eight currencies.
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That's not 10 connections.
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It's potentially dozens of unique banking relationships,
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each with its own licensing, safeguarding, bank integrations, liquidity,
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and risk management needs. The combinations multiply fast.
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And for most companies,
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the instinct is to go down this path by adding more relationships,
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more partners, more integrations, more banks, a.k.a.
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more complexity. What you actually want is something that looks like this:
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a single integration point that gives you access to every market.
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But getting from the N-squared world to this one, well,
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that's where our story begins.
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Now I want to talk about what it actually takes to go global,
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and why the traditional approach doesn't work.
Has anyone here opened a bank
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account in an international market? Okay.
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And did anyone find that process slightly painful? Yeah. Yeah.
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It is quite the process.
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From apostilles-did not know what that meant before starting this process-to
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notaries, it's a bureaucratic obstacle course.
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I have literally stapled passport-size photos of myself onto documents,
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wet-signed my signature across my forehead to prove it had not been tampered
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with. And this isn't just paperwork. It's a systemic barrier to entry.
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This traditional way of establishing a global presence is slow,
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prohibitively expensive, and does not scale.
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If you have to spend months of time filling out dozens of forms just to get a
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local IBAN, you aren't innovating. You're just surviving the bureaucracy.
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And at Stripe, we hit this wall hard. As we grew,
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the complexity became exponential. For every new market,
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product and currency combination we wanted to launch,
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we needed a specific banking partner to support it.
And each one came with those
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headaches I talked about earlier-bespoke API or legacy SFTP server.
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It was completely unmanageable.
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Our roadmap was being dictated by the speed of bank KYC departments rather than
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our own engineers. So we paused,
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gathered around the nearest whiteboard,
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and we dug deep into the problem and eventually arrived at a scalable solution,
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which was to establish an internal treasury management system known as an
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"in-house bank." The traditional model that we were running-one entity,
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one bank account, one country-was like the old days of buying physical servers.
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Every new market meant buying more hardware.
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We needed to shift to the cloud phase:
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virtualized infrastructure that would scale without the physical overhead.
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By building an in-house bank entity,
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we created a central financial hub that provides global treasury services to
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participating Stripe entities.
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Those treasury services include trading FX, settling intercompany flows,
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and placing and borrowing funds from the in-house bank entity.
Instead of moving
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money across expensive international borders, we use local accounts,
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leveraging the receive-on-behalf-of or pay-on-behalf-of frameworks.
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Then another breakthrough came when we realized that the same in-house bank
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infrastructure that we built to improve our own internal corporate treasury
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services could be turned into a product for you. Here's what this means for you.
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Real-time,
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multicurrency support without months of bank onboarding or legal setup.
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We handled the complexity of physical money storage, the licensing,
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the safeguarding, the partner integrations,
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and the liquidity operations so you don't have to.
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This means when you need to get paid in the UK, we aren't sending a slow,
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expensive SWIFT message from a US account. Instead,
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we're utilizing our local UK presence to move funds domestically while our in-
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house bank handles the ledgering behind the scenes.
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Because we're integrated locally in the market,
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you can get local US or UK account details for your invoices and payments.
Just
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as AWS virtualized servers so you don't have to buy a rack of hardware,
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we've virtualized treasury so you can manage your business globally without the
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infrastructure burden.
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We've replaced the notary and the stapler with a virtualized ledger and turned
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going global from a multiyear project into a few lines of code.
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So how did all of this become a product you can actually use? Well,
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let me show you Treasury.
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We talked about the complexity of managing money globally and how we virtualize
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that infrastructure. But infrastructure alone isn't the product.
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The question you're really asking is,
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"What does this mean for my business?" Remember those three core capabilities I
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talked about before, accepting, storing, and sending funds?
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Treasury is how we deliver all three.
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Think about how most global businesses manage their money today.
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You accept a payment from a customer in euros.
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Your payment provider converts those euros into dollars because that's your home
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currency.
Great, money's in the door.
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But then you need to pay a supplier in Europe.
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So now you're converting dollars back into euros.
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You've paid for foreign exchange twice: once on the way in,
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once on the way out.
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We call this the "double FX trap," and it's quietly eating into your margins
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every single day. With Treasury, that cycle breaks.
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You can receive funds like for like in whatever currency your customer pays.
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If they pay you in euros, those euros land in Treasury and stay as euros.
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You can hold them there indefinitely.
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When you're ready to pay that European supplier, you spend those euros directly.
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No second conversion, no mystery fees, no margin erosion.
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And it goes beyond avoiding unnecessary FX.
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From a single global account with Treasury, you can pay balances in US dollars,
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euros,
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and British pounds today-without setting up new local accounts,
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without negotiating new banking contracts,
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without weeks of paperwork.
When you need to convert between currencies,
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you can do it instantly right from your Stripe Dashboard at competitive market
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rates. You choose the moment, you see the rate, you execute.
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And because your payments and money management live on the same platform,
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you can manage the full life cycle in one place.
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Money comes in through Stripe Payments, sits in Treasury,
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converts when you need it to,
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and then you pay out to vendors or other parties without leaving the platform.
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And this isn't just a hypothetical.
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We're seeing users who earn revenue in multiple currencies-dollars, euros,
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pounds-using multicurrency settlement to receive and hold those balances in
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Treasury and then pay their obligations directly in each currency.
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Then at the end of the month,
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they convert whatever's left into their home currency, for example,
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to meet payroll. One conversion, once a month.
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Instead of converting everything on the way in and then converting again on the
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way out.
This isn't just operational convenience. It's a P&L benefit.
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Every unnecessary FX conversion is margin you're losing.
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Every hour your team spends reconciling across providers is an hour not
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spent on your actual business. What used to take months to stand up,
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opening a new currency for your business now takes minutes.
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Now let's look ahead because everything I've described so far operates on
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traditional financial rails. And those rails, as good as we've made them,
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still have constraints. Banks close. Weekends happen.
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Time zones create friction.
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If you've ever had a large payment stuck in limbo over a holiday weekend,
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you know exactly what I'm talking about. Stablecoins change this.
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Think of our Global Payments and Treasury Network as a highway system.
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Stablecoins are a new high speed lane on that same highway.
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One that runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with near-instant settlement.
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But let me make this concrete because we did this ourselves in Treasury.
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Stripe needed to settle an intercompany obligation from the US to Mexico.
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Traditionally, this would mean an international wire,
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dollars out of a US bank through correspondent banks converted to Mexican pesos,
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and deposited in a Mexican account.
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That process can take one to two business days,
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and it involves intermediary fees at every step.
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Instead, we use what's called a "stablecoin sandwich."
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We converted US dollars to a dollar-denominated stablecoin using Bridge's
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orchestration layer,
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and that stablecoin moved virtually and instantaneously. On the other end,
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it was converted into Mexican pesos and deposited into the local Mexican bank
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account. The result:
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approximately 256 million Mexican pesos,
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14 million US, moved before breakfast.
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Start to finish. Compare that to the multiday wire it replaced.
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It wasn't just faster. It was more transparent, more predictable,
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and the execution cost was lower.
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This is why we see stablecoins as more than a niche feature.
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They fill gaps that traditional rails can't: weekend settlement,
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real-time cross-border transfers,
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and access to stable assets in economies where that stability is hard to come
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by. We're building this into the same platform that you already use.
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You won't need a separate integration or a new provider.
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As these capabilities come online, they'll be available in Treasury,
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alongside your payment processing and the rest of your existing Stripe
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infrastructure.
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It's another lane on the highway and you'll use it when it makes sense for your
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business. When I think about where money management is heading,
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I see a world where the boundaries between traditional finance and new rails
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become invisible to you.
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You shouldn't have to think about whether a payment moves over ACH or
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Faster Payments or a stablecoin rail.
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You should tell us where the money needs to go, how fast, at what cost limit,
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and the infrastructure figures out the best path.
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That's the system we're building.
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We're building it so that treasury is no longer a department you have to staff
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up. It's infrastructure that works for you and a feature that you can turn on.
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Dashboard, balances, activate Treasury. That's it.
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And the best way to understand what this means in practice is to hear from
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companies who are living it.
Bart Heideman leads product for payouts and
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marketplaces at Stripe.
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He works with companies like these every day on exactly these problems.
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He's going to sit down with Adam Ballai and Derek Shimozawa from Replit and
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Mercor-two companies that went global fast and had to figure out treasury along
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the way. They'll share what worked, what didn't,
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and what they wished they had known earlier. Over to you, Bart.
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Thank you, Leland.
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So you just heard how Stripe thinks about global money movement,
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but now I want to flip the lens.
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What does this actually feel like when you're on the other side,
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building a company, growing fast, and trying not to light your hair on fire,
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trying to figure out payments? It didn't cost me my hair,
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but I definitely get a bit gray sometimes when figuring out payments.
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What I'm going to do,
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I'm going to quickly introduce our guests and then we're going to dive straight
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in. So I'm joined here by Adam, director of money at Replit.
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Replit is the cloud-based, AI-powered platform where developers can code, run,
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and deploy applications straight in the browser.
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And Replit has been global from day one.
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They're thinking hard about how to localize pricing, adapt to different markets,
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and keep their internal operations simple as they scale.
And I'm joined further
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on my left by Derek, head of payments product at Mercor,
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the AI-powered talent marketplace.
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They went from processing payouts that were in total of $200,000 a
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month. In a matter of weeks,
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they scaled to $2 million a day-virtually all of that on Stripe Connect.
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And Derek has seen what happens when your payments volume outpaces your
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infrastructure and how getting it right matters. So let's get started.
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Leland described the N-squared problem. Every new country and currency pair,
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creating exponential complexity. When you were getting started,
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did you appreciate how hard the money side was going to be or did it blindside
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you? Maybe we start with Derek and then we'll go to Adam.
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Sure. So as Bart said, Mercor is an AI talent marketplace.
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We work directly with experts that are working on the next generation of AI
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models with frontier labs, with enterprises.
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And that type of talent lives anywhere, which means we were global from Day One.
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We had to meet our experts where they were,
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and that means being able to pay out almost everywhere.
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I think the finer point is for us,
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working in AI now means
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there really is no opportunity anymore to gradually outgrow your manual
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processes. And for myself,
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I was at Airbnb about six years ago, pre-IPO.
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We were moving super fast by any normal measure.
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And as we're growing, you can start to see some of the cracks form.
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But my experience at Mercor now,
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especially working so closely with AI,
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is by the time you see the cracks now,
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the water's already coming through the walls.
And I think that's the
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additional framing that it would just add onto the N-squared problem.
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It's not so much that the complexity compounds-which I completely agree with.
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It's also that the rate at which that compounds is faster than most human
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processes can keep up with now.
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And Adam?
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Yeah. So Replit is powering the first billion in developers out there
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to build anything they want. And so at Day One,
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we also need to be global and thinking about developers come from anywhere in
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the world. They can be from a small village to a city,
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and we want to make sure that they have access.
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And so when we think about how we want to be global,
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it kind of goes back to the open question that we had.
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I had many years ago when thinking about my former opportunity where I was put
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in this exact same situation before Stripe existed.
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And we had to build all of these rails that you saw up on stage.
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They required us to start hiring experts because I didn't know how to solve this
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problem. And so it became an interesting challenge for us to think about all the
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different networks, all the different partners.
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And we actually needed to figure out also prioritization because could we be
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building our product more in a specific region over these different challenges?
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But it's great to have a partner with Replit and Stripe.
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Of course, with Stripe.
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Yeah.
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And Derek, follow-up question. You mentioned you went,
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I think you started paying out from a handful of markets to basically going
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global. And what's like the first thing that broke for you?
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Yeah, that's easy: ClickOps.
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Okay.
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So when I say "ClickOps," what I mean is those kind of daily processes or weekly
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processes that your company runs to get things done.
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And in our case, the most critical ClickOps that we had,
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especially at the beginning was wage day,
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like paying out the wages to these experts that are working on the frontiers.
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And at the very beginning,
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when we started-and this is only like maybe a year ago-we were moving maybe
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$200,000 a month and now we move over $2 million a day.
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And from a ClickOps perspective,
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what that means is it started off as a minor inconvenience, right?
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Like five to 10 minutes,
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you have a single engineer in front of the screen literally clicking out and
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sending out payouts-which sounds ridiculous now.
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But over time it quickly compounds, and I hinted at that earlier,
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that compounds so fast. And before you know it,
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it's broken.
And I think that's the thing is,
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it requires recognizing that requires a certain amount of discipline because as
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you're moving that fast,
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every single manual operation that you introduce into your day-to-day
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operations-especially ones that are so critical to, say, your marketplace,
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like paying out your experts-is a potential failure vector.
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And I guess doubling down on my point earlier is the time to
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replace those vectors, those potential failures is a lot,
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a lot sooner than you might expect.
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And I think, Adam,
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similar question for you with Replit being global from Day One,
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how do you think about adding maybe additional operational complexity,
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like new entities,
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multiple currency settlement versus staying sort of more like USD-only focused,
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like keeping it simpler?
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Yeah. When you are,
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and this goes back to this original point I was making where you want to focus
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on your product, you want to go to market as fast as you possibly can.
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You want to keep as many operations as lean as possible.
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And so when you think in one currency,
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it makes it easier for all of your reconciliation and all the different
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combinatorial explosions that occur in your finance operation.
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And when you're thinking about who you want to hire for,
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how do you want to grow your team?
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Do you want to use your budget to expand in finance or do you want to think
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about more intelligent ways to do more automation to enable it?
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So like localizing your currency,
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but still settling in USD is a value.
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And so I think a lot of what we're talking about here is,
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is there ways for you to keep that funds within Stripe and then transfer it out
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from a payout use case seems to be really powerful for companies to really focus
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on what really matters at the end of the day.
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And I think like at times we sort of hear from startups,
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they're thinking about like, "This payment thing,
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let's figure this out later." And what is maybe an advice you would have?
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What's like the thing that you wish somebody would have told you from the start
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when you were starting out?
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Should I go first?
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Yeah, you can go first.
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I think top of mind,
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the thing that's most salient right now for Mercor is hiring.
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So it's not so much actually what we would build, it's who.
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And that means building teams of experienced builders that have-I
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alluded to the cracks before-that can almost anticipate what we need to build
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next before those cracks even come up because like I said,
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there is no time anymore. There's very little runway at this point.
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And so having people in the room-and I can attest-if you
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look back at our history, our short history,
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every architectural accident that we've avoided has been because we have an
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expert in the room that has the battlescars and said, "Well, listen,
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somewhere else I've experienced this. This is what we need to do." So for me,
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to answer your question,
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the first thing I would do from Day One is build a team of builders, intense,
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urgent builders that have the battle scars and knows what scales looks
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like from Day One because you really don't have time to learn on a job,
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especially things like treasury and payments.
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And Adam? Very ambitious?
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Yeah, very ambitious. And actually the way to go, I 100% agree with you.
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Get a small crack team to go at the problem as soon as they can with leveraging
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all the tools and the environment. But for Replit,
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there's a big learning actually we had when I first joined the company and it
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was an interesting thing that I wish I had known in my previous time is
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who you partner with when you think about prioritizing your global expansion
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efforts.
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And I'd always partnered with finance or partnered with some other group of
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people to think about how do we get the paperwork done,
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but we never thought about how do we actually think about the strategy for
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executing in that environment with a partnerships team, a sales team,
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a marketing team. And when you think deeper about that partnership,
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you act as one full team going towards a deployment in a country,
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which enables you to have better localized pricing and also save you a bunch of
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time about all the extra things that you have to do to help put that country
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online.
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You were saying it's hard sometimes to do payments when you're growing this
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fast.
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How do you convince folks internally to maybe take a step back,
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pause a little bit and get sort of payments right?
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How did you go about doing that?
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Yeah, I'll try to give an AI bent on that answer.
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Okay. You have to.
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Yeah.
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Exactly.
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That would make sense.
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A payments group within an AI company, especially one like Mercor,
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is in a really unique position because you're moving with this huge amount
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of intensity and purpose and speed, but at the same time,
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in terms of responsibility, you still have the accountability,
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regulatory oversight of say a fintech.
And
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organizations like OFAC or FinCen,
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they don't care whether you're a startup or not,
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you still have to play by the rules. And so going to your question,
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I think the argument that I've found most effective is this,
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because at Mercor, we are trying to automate everything.
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There's going to be agents around everything we do from issuing contracts,
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setting prices, providing advice and suggestions to our expert community,
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and yes, payments. And so the argument is that as you automate,
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automation doesn't reduce risk if the underlying assumptions and data are
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unreliable. In fact, it just amplifies it.
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And so as we move forward,
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I think there is definitely a need to, like I said,
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have people in the room that have seen this before.
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And I think also the argument isn't so much,
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"Let's slow down."
It's, "Let's think about this.
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Have we thought about all the edge cases? What else could go wrong?
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What are we not thinking about?" Because especially in the age of AI now,
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when you ask the question of, "Can we do this?" More often than not now,
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the answer is "Yes. Yes, we can do this.
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And we can probably do it tomorrow or even now." I think the more interesting
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question that we have to ask on top of that, especially working in payments,
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treasury accounting functions is, well, what else are we not thinking about?
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And that requires a diverse team, including young,
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energetic and people who've seen it before.
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And when I hear you talk, you focus a little bit more on the money out. I hear,
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Adam, you're talking more about the money coming in.
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Maybe the question for the panel, when these worlds collide,
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what breaks? What happens? Maybe Adam?
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Yeah.
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So when you're thinking about how do you move from moving money in to
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moving money out, what's the type of systems that you need to build?
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And so at Replit, we try to think about how to move fast,
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how to leverage and leap forward with technology.
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And so we adopt standards like x402 to help us with pass through billing with
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our partners. And so those enable us to move much quicker,
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to be able to onboard more partners and be able to handle payouts without
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necessarily all this heavy weight that we might need to do on the treasury side.
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And maybe if we're going to look a little bit of it like the future,
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Leland was talking about that your future infrastructure should abstract
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away whether it's rails-ACH, Faster Payments, stablecoins.
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How do you think about that?
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Do you think that vision actually matches what you are seeing in the market?
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Do you think that that's where we're going?
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Yeah. There's a lot of what Leland talked about from the N-squared problem to
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stablecoin rails to abstracting out that complexity that makes a lot of sense.
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We're seeing that every single day. Really quickly,
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I think on stablecoin for us, we haven't embraced it yet,
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but I think it's an eventuality. It's inevitable,
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especially for any global marketplace that's operating like in LATAM.
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One of the things I think us and many other startups are watching is financial
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regulations,
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stablecoin regulations as we start to embrace it and as we start to build
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it into our platform.
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And Adam, how do you think about it?
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The fact that we are only six months old with a lot of this technology and we
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can adopt it is just amazing. So let's just keep going. Let's keep investing.
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Right. And maybe
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I'm going to ask you a little bit of a product management type question.
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I think we even asked this in our interviews, Adam.
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So let's imagine you have this magic wand.
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I say this word "magic wand," I think, at least three times a week.
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What's something that you would love to have in your platform at Replit from a
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payments perspective that you don't have today?
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Yeah.
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So we have to prioritize how we think about international expansion from a
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payments perspective all the time.
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Having signals about those markets is really powerful. What's the adoption like?
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What's the willingness to pay?
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That would be a magic wand to have-just if any startups out there listening.
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Thank you so much for your time. Maybe a last question before we break.
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If you were starting over tomorrow,
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what's the one thing you would wire into your money stack,
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the thing that you would absolutely do? Maybe Derek and then Adam.
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A ledger.
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It's really hard to build transparency into your system after the fact.
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And my hot take is for any startup, especially a marketplace,
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a ledger becomes an inevitable eventuality.
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All good outcomes arise from it, whether it's getting acquired,
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going public, IPO. Yeah.
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Mine is very related,
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which is how you think about the currency for what you're doing with credits
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when you're selling credits.
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So I've actually dealt with this problem twice where we've sold credits in USD
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and centering on USD.
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Center it on your own currency and build that into your ledger.
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Great. Adam, Derek, thank you so much for your time. I love this conversation.
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And maybe before we break everything you saw today-multicurrency
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storage, instant FX conversion, stablecoin rails-this is live today.
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So maybe one final plug: go into your Dashboard, go to the balance page,
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and activate our Treasury product. Thank you, all.