Thank you very much for having me.
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for the opportunity to speak before the committee today.
My co-founder and brother John and I are originally from Dublin in Ireland. When we founded our first company almost 20 years ago, we found that accepting payments online was clunky, tedious and required enormous amounts of arcane knowledge. That's why we started Stripe, to make it easier to adopt online payments and to simplify the process for both software developers and for small businesses.
Stripe has operated in Canada for more than a decade. We just opened a new office in Toronto, and we have almost 350 employees across Canada. We compete energetically to help Canadian businesses grow, export and manage their revenue. Stripe powers Canada's start-ups and small businesses as well as some of the largest enterprises, and we're proud of our ability to support Canadian companies that have grown their payment volume on Stripe by more than 50% over the last two years.
Now, competition in payments is a good thing, and we believe that we need more of it. Strong competition pushes all of us to innovate and benefits businesses and consumers. I believe that there are key interconnected policy areas where this committee can help increase competition further, including payment alternatives and open banking policies.
Canadian businesses will grow if they can offer their customers the payment methods of their choice, and competitive alternatives in the marketplace will foster innovation and better access. There are now hundreds of payment methods around the world with more, it seems, popping up almost every day, and many of them are based on credit and debit cards, but there is a growing set of alternative payment methods such as Pix in Brazil or UPI in India that are affordable, convenient and growing very quickly.
These are bank-to-bank payment systems, and they're often built on a real-time payment infrastructure with a technology overlay that better connects businesses and consumers. Typically this overlay is most successful when it is more open to innovators, and it's often policy-makers who play a leading role in fostering these ecosystems. We're optimistic and hopeful about Canada's real-time rail system. To fully realize its benefits, we believe that policy-makers should ensure broad access to this infrastructure to deliver the rail to the market as soon as possible.
We're supportive of the government's efforts to promote open banking; however, I will note that the decision to not include payment facilitation in Canada's open banking framework is a missed opportunity to foster new entrants and potentially better payment alternatives.
We've seen, in a number of jurisdictions that have moved more decisively on open banking, including the U.K., Australia and recently the United States, that open banking can help support bank-to-bank payment systems, which in turn increases competition, reduces costs and enables innovation that could benefit all Canadians.
Finally, as policy-makers consider different approaches to lowering the cost of card payments, we think that it's important to preserve the ability for providers to offer flat-rate pricing, which is critical for many businesses, especially small businesses, for two main reasons. The first is scalability. Standardized pricing is part of the reason that modern payment systems are able to serve small businesses in large numbers, because the traditional, negotiated idiosyncratic model left many small businesses underserved. The costs of serving were too high.
The second reason is simplicity and predictability for the business. This is a very complicated space with a lot of different factors that go into payment processing costs, interchange fees and taxes—the whole gamut. At the same time, there's been significant innovation with software that can dramatically improve payments. As a result of optimizations that we've made, for example, businesses using Stripe's latest checkout suite saw an average revenue increase of 11.9%.
These services go far beyond basic card processing, and they're included in our simple standard pricing, which has remained unchanged in Canada for eight years, even as underlying costs have evolved and as the functionality that we offer has grown.
Canadian businesses have well over 50 different payment options to choose from, running the full continuum on pricing and functionality. We will endeavour to continue to compete vigorously to ensure that the market has the greatest possible choice.
We believe in Canadian entrepreneurialism, and we're committed to helping grow the Canadian economy. We exist to serve the needs of Canadian businesses here and to help them operate around the world. Our success is inextricably linked to theirs.
With that, I welcome your questions.
Thank you.
