$20 billion Stripe is making a new global push with the product that's helping open source developers on GitHub get paid for the code they write

Reuters/Albert Gea

Stripe CEO and co-founder Patrick Collison

• On Tuesday, $20 billion Stripe announced that it's expanding Connect Express, its product for quickly bringing customers onto its payments platform, to 28 more countries.
• Connect Express helps sellers easily onboard onto sites like Medium, Anchor FM, and more.
• Stripe also partnered with GitHub, which used Connect Express for its GitHub Sponsors product, which helps developers get paid for the code they write.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The $20 billion payment tech company Stripe is making it easier for people around the world to get paid.

The product in question is called Stripe Connect Express, and it helps platforms like Spotify and Medium sign up new sellers to their platforms. To use those examples: Connect Express has helped Spotify quickly sign up new independent artists to get paid per play of their music, and Medium uses it to pay out writers for their slice of paywall revenue.

It's also won some larger customers, like the Microsoft-owned GitHub, which uses Stripe Connect Express to power GitHub Sponsors - a feature that allows programmers to get paid for the open source they write and host on the service.

When Connect Express launched last year, it was only available in the US and Canada. On Tuesday, however, Stripe announced that it's coming to 28 new countries, including Germany and Spain.

Stripe says that Connect Express is so desirable because it helps save its customers valuable time when it comes to writing the code that signs up new sellers and service providers to their platform. With this international expansion, it's poised to bring those same benefits to more companies around the globe.

"If I'm a platform that's getting started today, it's much much easier to onboard sellers because I have to write less code," James Dyett, head of enterprise sales at Stripe, told Business Insider. "I have access to sellers in many many more markets because Stripe is opening up express to all these new countries."

Dyett says that the main goal of Connect Express is to make it easy for users to understand how to get started. It also took a lot of energy for Stripe to make sure that it met international regulatory requirements, and that it had the right relationships with local banks in each country.

The work is worth it, Dyett says, because it could make it easier for the next generation of startups all over the world to get off the ground.

"It literally reduced months or years of engineering work to in many cases, a handful of weeks to get started," Dyett said. "Our hope is adding all these new countries with express helps power the next generation of Shopify or the next generation of Kickstarter or DoorDashes."

A partnership with GitHub

Dyett highlights the success of GitHub Sponsors as a sign of what Connect Express can do for its customers.

Even for a company of GitHub's size and scale, Connect Express's international expansion stands to help it reach new users all around the world. Dyett says that Connect Express helps make it automatic for its users to localize their products for international markets: For example, if developers in Poland wants to sign up for GitHub Sponsors, the platform is in Polish, and they'll be able to enter Polish bank details.

Read more: These are the programming languages that are used by America's most valuable startups, from Airbnb to WeWork

"It's an onboarding flow that will feel natural for developers in all these countries to go through so GitHub didn't have to do the market research to make sure the particular part of their experience would feel authentic or easy for developers in every country," Dyett said.

Furthermore, Dyett boasts that it only took GitHub two months to put Connect Express into place, because Stripe handled so much of the heavy engineering load.

"I think about how fast GitHub launched this product," Dyett said. "We're talking about two months. When we hear that, that gets us excited at Stripe. People all over the world can bring products to life really really quickly and inexpensively. That's what happened with GitHub. We're excited to partner with many many more platforms and businesses."