• Stripe launched in the UAE in June and has plans to expand to other Gulf countries
• Collison said it was also “not implausible” that the company would start accepting payments in cryptocurrencies again in the future
U.S. biggest fintech giant Stripe’s co-founder John Collison said it is not planning to go public in the immediate future, following a report that the company is planning to list itself in 2022.
“We’re very happy as a private company,” Collison told CNBC at the Fintech Abu Dhabi festival. “Part of where our patience stems from is the fact that it feels like we are very early in Stripe’s journey.”
Collison’s comments followed a Bloomberg report published two weeks ago saying that Stripe is in early talks with investment banks to go public through a direct listing or an initial public offering as early as next year, citing people familiar with the matter.
Expansion to Gulf
Collison, who is currently Stripe’s president, told CNBC that the firm has plans to expand across the Persian Gulf, including countries like the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.
He also added that Stripe already has clients from $7.5 billion food delivery firm Deliveroo to a small gym wear brand called Squatwolf using the fintech giant’s payment system for the region.
“We launched here in the UAE in June only, and we’ve seen this massive ramp-up,” Collison said.
“This is a massive region that is just starting to inflect in terms of its own growth,” he added. “It feels like we are very early on that journey, we’re still heavily investing.”
$95 billion private behemoth
It’s not the first time Stripe has denied media reports of an anticipated market debut.
Stripe, founded in 2009 by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison, is currently the world’s largest private fintech startup with a whopping $95 billion valuation.
The company’s major competitors include PayPal, Square, Adyen, and Checkout.com.
Stripe has been increasingly expanding into other areas of finance, too, including lending and tax management. The firm has ruled out the idea of becoming a fully-fledged bank.
Venturing into digital assets and blockchain
Another space Stripe has begun moving into more recently is digital assets and blockchain, as the fintech giant in October announced that it had formed a team for crypto and Web3, an anticipated decentralized version of the internet.
Collison told CNBC that several innovations are emerging in the crypto market that have caught his attention, from Solana — an Ethereum rival to “Layer 2” blockchain systems like Bitcoin’s Lightning Network designed to speed up transactions with lower prices processing cost.
“There have been a lot of developments of late with an eye to making cryptocurrencies better and, in particular, scalable and acceptable cost as a payment method,” Collison said.
In 2018, Stripe stopped supporting payments in Bitcoin, citing price volatility and a lack of efficiency to scale.
The fintech giant’s co-founder said it’s “not implausible” when CNBC asked whether Stripe could start accepting payments in crypto again in the future.
Picture Credit: NYTimes