How Stripe Plans To Make Mobile Pay

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, whose company offers an easily installed payments service for applications, believes there's a big problem in mobile—and that's how to make money.

"One of the trends in mobile is that advertising isn't doing very well," he told Business Insider deputy editor Nicholas Carlson in an interview at the Ignition Mobile conference in San Francisco Thursday. "It's very possible that advertising business models will simply never do as well on mobile devices as those oriented around transactions."

Stripe has courted mobile-app developers by offering a service that makes it easy to take credit-card payments in two ways: First, by avoiding the need to get approved for a merchant account by a conventional provider, and second, by simplifying the process of adding payments code to an app.

To that second end, Collison announced a partnership with Parse, a provider of mobile-app-building tools, which obviates the need to set up a server to accept payments. That's the kind of developer-friendly touch that has built Stripe's cult-like reputation among appmakers.

Stripe powers apps like Lyft, the ride-sharing service, and Exec, the on-demand assistant service. Its primary competitor in the app-payments market is Braintree, which is used by e-commerce apps like HotelTonight and Fab.

Collison said he didn't see PayPal, eBay's payments service, as an alternative many of his customers considered. All three of PayPal's cofounders—Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Max Levchin—have invested in Stripe, as has early PayPal backer Sequoia Capital.