Dive Brief:
- Stripe, the 11-year-old company that has enabled businesses to take payments online, has agreed to buy Recko, an Indian software company that automates the accounting process of reconciling payments, according to a Wednesday press release. A spokesperson for Stripe declined to disclose financial details of the transaction.
- Recko, founded by two entrepreneurs in 2017, was designed to aid internet merchants in monitoring their payments by reconciling large amounts of transactional data. The company now operates globally, with customers that include British online food delivery company Deliveroo, Indian e-commerce marketplace Meesho and Indian online pharmacy company PharmEasy, according to the release.
- “Stripe helps millions of businesses around the world streamline their revenue management — from subscriptions and invoicing to revenue recognition and bookkeeping," Stripe's chief product officer, Will Gaybrick, said in the release. "With Recko, we’ll automate their payments reconciliation, a critical input into their overall financial health.”
Dive Insight:
Privately held Stripe, with dual headquarters in Dublin and San Francisco, is investing across the business landscape, acquiring online fraud prevention company Bouncer and cloud-based tax services firm TaxJar this year, and this month turning its attention to building a cryptocurrency team.
Recko will allow customers to better track their payments, and ultimately better manage their businesses, Stripe said in the release. The process of reconciliation, which matches transactions across ledgers, can be time-consuming and tedious, but pays dividends when done properly.
"Finance teams perform reconciliation to uncover discrepancies, avoid incorrect accounting and understand a company’s financial health at a point in time," the release said.
Bangalore-based Recko can assess a company's payment processing with data gathered from emails and other documents; manage fees, currency conversions and refunds; and produce sharable reconciliation reports, according to the release.
“Joining Stripe is a perfect next chapter for Recko, and we can’t wait to help grow the [gross domestic product] of the internet by removing the burden of reconciliation complexity," Recko CEO Saurya Prakash Sinha said in the release.
The Recko acquisition is part of Stripe's ongoing campaign to invest in India, which includes adding IT assets there and "rapid local hiring," the release said. India has the world's sixth-largest economy and second-largest population, according to the World Bank.
Stripe is no stranger to international expansion. It reached into Africa last year with the acquisition of Nigerian fintech Paystack, which this year broached the South Africa market.
Stripe was founded in 2010 by a pair of Irish brothers eyeing a solution for businesses looking to accept payments over the internet. Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and President John Collison, both in their early 30s, have piled up $2.2 billion in capital, according to Crunchbase, to drive acquisitions, expansion and investments. And along the way, the company captured a $95 billion valuation.
The company is part of a burgeoning band of fintechs seeking to disintermediate the traditional banking and financial service industries by offering digitally based products and software that are faster and simpler to use. Such startups have been raising record amounts of venture money this year and driving increased deal-making.
While Stripe gained traction initially by attracting business from startups, including Shopify, Grab and Spotify, it has also landed more established companies, including Amazon and Google, as clients.
Recko's customers will continue to be able to access its products directly, according to the release. The Stripe spokesperson declined to say how many employees Recko has, or how many workers Stripe has in India.
