Terminal can help businesses integrate online and in-person payments with software development kits and card readers.
With just days to go until Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Stripe has expanded its in-person payments service Terminal to Ireland, France, Germany, the UK and the Netherlands.
This European expansion comes two years after Stripe Terminal was made generally available in the US, letting online businesses extend their Stripe capability to accept in-person payments.
Stripe Terminal is a service that allows businesses to integrate their online and in-person payments through a set of software development kits (SDKs), application programming interfaces (APIs) and pre-certified card readers.
Businesses such as Germany’s Taxi.de and the UK’s Indy Cinema Group already offer in-person payments, but Stripe Terminal is expected to make the payments process simpler and more uniform for clients.
“With Stripe Terminal we can provide our riders with the option to pay for their taxi once their journey is complete. Before this would have meant asking drivers to onboard onto a completely different payments system, but now it’s seamless,” said Ulf Bögeholz, CTO of Taxi.de.
Similarly, cinemas can now integrate and unify their online ticket sales with their in-person popcorn sales through Stripe Terminal for Indy Cinema. “It was hard having to see our users manage separate, disconnected products in order to accept payments in the real world,” said Indy Cinema CEO Ian Brown.
“With Stripe Terminal, we can add more value and efficiency for our users, and our users can sidestep the drudgery of manually reconciling their online and in-person payments, leaving them to focus on their customers and growing their cinemas business.”
Many online businesses wanting to accept in-person payments often have to use entirely different payments systems – stitching together point-of-sale hardware and software, managing security and payment certification, and complying with regulatory and hardware requirements.
“Over the last decade it’s become much easier to accept in-person or online payments. But as soon as you want to do both, it would get complex and challenging,” said Matt Henderson, EMEA business lead at Stripe. “The expansion of Stripe Terminal means businesses in Europe can easily unify their in-person and online payments experiences.”
Stripe has been expanding its “economic infrastructure for the internet” in Europe and across the world by broadening its services rapidly. Its roll-out of Terminal is expected to create powerful competition for others in the space, including the UK’s SumUp and US-based Square.
In April, Stripe brought its card issuing service, Stripe Issuing, to businesses in 20 European markets, including Ireland. Last month, it also struck a ‘buy now, pay later’ deal with Stockholm-based fintech Klarna to step up its game in an increasingly competitive space.
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