00:00AsiaPAC is key to your growth strategy, but it is a very fragmented market.
00:06If you take a look at Singapore and Australia, they're big on digital adoption,
00:10but when you talk about Japan, it's still very cash-driven.
00:13How is that shaping the strategy in this part of the world?
00:16Yeah, well, we look at it from a position of how do we increase GDP of the internet?
00:21And our real focus is helping merchants grow.
00:24So how we look at that across all these fragmented markets is a part of where they are in their journey.
00:30So as you said, Japan is very cash-driven, but they have a big market drive to digitize payments.
00:37Southeast Asia, I think, is one of the most innovative payment market in the world
00:42with real-time payments coming through.
00:44Stripe's infrastructure supports all of those payment methods across the world
00:49and also enables themes that we're seeing that are common across all of the countries in Asia,
00:55which is cross-border trade, agentic commerce,
00:59and we're seeing more and more interest in stablecoin as well.
01:02Stablecoin is huge.
01:04They say you can do it 24-7, and it is a market worth something like $4 trillion.
01:09But if you take a look at a player like Ant, for example, is only doing about a billion.
01:14Why is there no traction?
01:16Why is there still no scale?
01:18We see that it's still early days for the use of stablecoin.
01:23But at Stripe, we are seeing a lot of traction.
01:26So we're seeing 100 percentage points growth in use of payments.
01:30We've enabled payments within the Stripe infrastructure.
01:33But that's from a low base still, right?
01:33It's from a low base, yes, but it's growing exponentially.
01:37And so our thesis over the next few years is that stablecoin will underpin a number of important trends,
01:43agentic commerce being one, organizations using stablecoin to manage their own treasury around the world,
01:51and then cross-border trade.
01:53Because stablecoin, unlike the Telegram-era Swift systems, is fast, it's open, it's cost-effective, importantly,
02:04and it's programmable, which means you can build the services into the services that you're offering,
02:11which means things happen really, really fast and in a really relatively safe way as well.
02:16So is it cross-border that is driving that growth, or is it things like remittances?
02:22I mean, if you take 12, 24 months down the road, what are you looking at?
02:25It's a bit of both.
02:27So we've turned on payments.
02:28So Shopify, for example, which operates all around the world and is an important Stripe customer,
02:34we've worked with them and they've turned on stablecoin as a payment method.
02:38So you can pay for stablecoin if you're in Australia or if you're in Argentina for a product on their site.
02:44So we're seeing strong growth in that area.
02:47The other side is remittance.
02:48So, for example, in the creator economy, you have platforms that are allowing people to create all of this content,
02:58and those content makers are actually in 200 countries all around the world because content is borderless.
03:04But how does the content company who is collecting the money pay out to a creator, say, in Bhutan?
03:11Well, they're starting to leverage stablecoin to do that much more effectively.
03:15And I have a customer, for example, that is selling cars from Japan, secondhand cars into Africa.
03:24And their biggest business problem is that their users, their customers, have to bring bags of U.S. dollar cash with security guards, with machine guns.
03:32And so we're solving that problem with stablecoin.
03:36Paul, where are the bottlenecks?
03:37How does Ant get from 1 billion to more than 100?
03:41Well, I think there's a couple of areas.
03:43So Stripe has merged, bought a company called Bridge.
03:47Bridge is enabling the infrastructure for stablecoin.
03:51You can issue your own stablecoin as a company.
03:54We've also bought Privy, which allows you to build your own wallet.
03:58And now we're building Tempo, a $500 billion valued company, which is layer one blockchain.
04:06The problem we're solving there is that the existing chains are built really for transactions, Bitcoin, Solana transactions, not trading transactions, not payment transactions.
04:21So 50,000, 60,000 transactions a second is not going to do it when you're operating globally.
04:26We need millions or tens of millions when everyone's using stablecoin to do their payments.
04:32So we're now building that as a separate company, which, again, will be open to any company to leverage.
04:38And then when you look at what we've announced with OpenAI, the agentic commerce protocol, which, again, is an open protocol that enables agents and merchants to leverage open tokenization for global trade, stablecoin will start to play a really important part in that network of agentic.
04:59You talked about how cross-border is actually driving that growth.
05:06Given the U.S.-China tensions, do you see that impacting volumes in any way?
05:10We haven't, actually.
05:11We've seen that all of our customers on the strike network continue to grow.
05:17There may be nuances to country relationships, but at an aggregate level, we're seeing the overall businesses grow.
05:24And what I found with merchants, particularly our Asian merchants, is they're so driven.
05:30There's so much activity to succeed that, you know, if one path isn't optimizing for them, they'll find another one very quickly.
05:38And they can turn on a new country and start trading within hours with Stripe.
05:43And so that's what we're seeing.
05:44What kind of growth are you anticipating, Paul?
05:45I mean, if you take a look at growth in Asia versus the U.S. and Europe, where does the region stand?
05:50Well, in our goal of growing the GDP of the Internet, when Stripe started 14 years ago, AIPAC represented 20% of global GDP.
06:00We now represent 40% of global GDP.
06:03We have a vast majority of the world's population, with Southeast Asia, India, the highest digitizing payments market in the world.
06:11So the opportunity is huge.
06:13And so what we're seeing is that our merchants are trading amongst each other.
06:19More than 55% of Stripe's business is cross-border trade.
06:23In fact, in Singapore, it's 65% Singaporean companies cross-border trade.
06:29And that's not just within Asia.
06:30It's globally.
06:31So we have companies like Canva, Minimax, Manus AI here in Singapore, all expanding globally and customers in many, many countries.
06:40In reverse, we're seeing a lot of our global customers from America, be it Shopify, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, all trading into Asia across all of our countries.
06:52What are the key factors that will drive and shape how business is done digitally?
07:00Digitally.
07:01I think simplicity.
07:03So merchants want to grow.
07:06We've seen that simplicity in the financial global infrastructure is really key.
07:12Company wants to grow.
07:13How do they do it?
07:14The old world took a very long time, very complex.
07:17You can now switch on a country and start trading within minutes.
07:21With Manus, we've just announced with them, they're leveraging our agentic sandbox.
07:27And what that means is all from within the Manus AI platform here in Singapore, you can build a website, build your commerce infrastructure, do all of your testing of payments.
07:39And when you're ready to go into production, simply finish your KYC authentication with Stripe and you are in production taking money right now.
07:47So the speed that Stripe enables and the reliability, in fact, yesterday was Singles Day, not Singles, so I didn't participate.
07:56And then we're coming into Black Friday and Christmas.
07:59You see billions and billions of dollars of trade.
08:02Stripe runs at six nines availability.
08:04So we work with the biggest, the Amazons, the Shopifys, down to the smallest companies during that trade period.
08:12And a lot of that is all cross-border growth.
08:14It comes down to trust in the end.
08:15You talk about agentic commerce, trust is key to get both sides.
08:20How are you addressing the issue?
08:21Well, the way we're addressing is a couple of ways.
08:24One, companies will trust Stripe because we're trusted, we're reliable, the world's biggest and smallest are using Stripe.
08:31We've also listened to our merchants about what concerns them on agentic commerce.
08:37And part of it is they want the customer relationship.
08:41And so as part of the ACP we built, the agent makes the purchase.
08:46Think of the agent as like a personal shopper.
08:49But the ultimate purchase, whilst tokenized card, actually the information passes through.
08:55So the merchant knows that I'm buying.
08:57They know my address because they're shipping the goods.
08:59And all of that is contemplated within the ACP.
09:02So the trust remains because the merchant feels comfortable that maybe instead of a Google search click, it's now coming from OpenAI or Manus.
09:12But they still know their customer.
09:14It's just an optimized way of searching.
09:16And we've seen 1,200% increase in agentic commerce over the last few months.
09:22Again, it's a small base and we're just growing.
09:24But since we made that announcement four weeks ago, the interest across Asia and the world, in fact, has been tremendous.
09:32So I can only see agentic playing a huge part in our future.
09:36And I actually believe merchants who aren't thinking about this will put themselves behind because I believe this is how we'll do commerce over the next few years.
09:46So I believe this is how we'll do commerce over the next few years.
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