Stripe, an online payment giant, does not want to go public just yet, according to the company's co-founder John Collison.
Stripe Remains As A Private Company
In an exclusive interview with CNBC's Hadley Gamble at the Fintech Abu Dhabi festival, Collison said they are very happy to be a private company. He said that part of where their patience stems from is that they are still very early in their journey.
Collison's comments come after a Bloomberg report said that the company was in early talks with investment banks about going public in 2022.
Collison said that Stripe plans to expand across the Persian Gulf, including Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia.
Strip already has exclusive clients from Deliveroo, a food delivery firm worth $7.5 billion. The gym wear brand Squatwolf also uses Stripe as its payment option.
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Collison, Stripe's president, said that they launched in the UAE in June and are just seeing the massive ramp-up.
He added that the UAE is a massive region that is just starting to inflect in terms of its own growth. He added that they feel like they are very early on the journey and still investing.
Stripe is unlikely to seek an IPO in the near future. This is not the first time Stripe shut down talks about a stock market debut.
The firm was last valued at $95 billion, making it worth more than Uber before the ride-hailing company's firm went public.
Stripe's Expansion
The firm was founded by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison in 2009. It has since grown to a payments powerhouse that processes billions of dollars in transactions every year for massive companies like Google, Amazon, and Deliveroo. The firm's competitors include Square, PayPal, Adyen, and Checkout.com.
Stripe has been expanding into other areas of finance, too, including lending and tax management. The company has ruled out the idea of being a bank, which is a move that would lead to increased regulatory scrutiny and costs.
Another space Stripe has started moving into is cryptocurrencies. The firm announced that it had established a team to focus on crypto and Web 3, a term that refers to a new, decentralized version of the internet.
Collison said that there are a couple of innovations emerging in the crypto market that he is interested in, from Solana, which is a competitor to Ethereum; and the second-biggest digital currency in the world, to Layer 2 blockchain systems similar to Bitcoin's Lightning Network, which are created to increase transactions and process them at a much lower cost.
Stripe accepted payments in Bitcoins before, but they stopped the support for cryptocurrency in 2018 because of price volatility and lack of efficiency, especially when it comes to transactions.
Collison added that a couple of developments in cryptocurrencies make it better now. When asked whether the firm would start accepting payments in crypto again, Collison said that it is a possibility.
In 2015, Stripe teamed up with Lyft to make it easier for passengers to pay. In the same year, Twitter also added Stripe as one of the payment methods for its market space.
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Written by Sophie Webster
