John Collison, the co-founder of Stripe – hailed as ‘the millenial’s Paypal’ – is visiting Singapore and took the time to speak at the Working Capitol yesterday evening. A Fireside chat organised by General Assembly, John shared his wisdom on the future of mobile, payments and being at the forefront of the Fintech space:
- People will buy directly from social media. Twitter and Facebook are hotspots for e-commerce activity.
- Interaction design for mobile will mature. There is much confusion around mobile optimisation – the approach to take is to start the journeys from scratch rather than adapting the mechanics of how a desktop website works. For example, instead of using ‘shopping carts’, the journey on the mobile should enable ‘instant buy’.
- Mobile users spend 80% of their time in-app (as reported by Forrester Research); in fact just 5 apps! So it is evident that users would prefer to experience a purpose-built native app for mobile when they are on one, compared to a mobile responsive website.
- His vision is to enable anyone to accept money from anywhere. The majority of the world population, particularly in the emerging and frontier markets, don’t have bank accounts and it is difficult to facilitate payments using current systems. He wants to make it easier to move money around online. Stripe is already accepting Bitcoin payments so I think they are well on their way to making this a reality!
Stripe is already in place in some of the most recognised names in the world such as Kickstarter, Heroku, Shopify, The Guardian and even Walmart. Stripe will be launching a private beta in Singapore soon. I can’t wait for it to be rolled out on this side of Asia!
