Stripe expands its infrastructure play with Data Pipeline to sync financial data with Amazon and Snowflake

Stripe — the payments giant valued at $95 billion — is on a product sprint to expand its services and functionality beyond the basic payments that form the core of its business today. Today the company took the wraps off Data Pipeline, an infrastructure product that will let its users create links between their Stripe transactions data and data stores that they keep in Amazon Redshift or Snowflake’s Data Cloud.

The move underscores how Stripe is positioning itself as more than just a payments provider. It has ambitions to be a larger financial services and data powerhouse, a “financial infrastructure platform for businesses” in its own words.

The launch comes just weeks after the company announced Financial Connections, which lets Stripe customers connect with their customers’ banking services to pull in more complete financial data about those users.

Data Pipeline — which has been working in a closed beta up to now — has already picked up a few early customers: ChowNow, Housecall Pro, HubSpot, Lime, Shipt and Zoom, which Stripe said use it to “automate downstream reporting and identify growth opportunities.” In other words, payments are still happening, but now Stripe’s turning the payments data result from those into a profit center of its own.

The product will let users incorporate Stripe financial data more comprehensively and easily with other business information, which in turn will let those users leverage that data in wider business intelligence efforts, as well as in financial reporting and in their work monitoring business activity for fraud, security issues and more.

This is notable for Stripe launching an infrastructure product, specifically in the area of ETL (extract, transform, load), which it built from the ground up internally, with the aim of replacing third-party products for its users. It is not the first product from the company aimed at the wider area of enterprise analytics, however: In 2017 the company launched Sigma, a tool to track payments data.

“Whereas Sigma allows you to access/query your Stripe data in the Stripe Dashboard, Data Pipeline allows you to access your Stripe data directly in your Snowflake or Amazon Redshift data warehouse,” said Vladi Shunturov, product lead at Stripe, in an emailed interview. “This way, Data Pipeline makes it easier to query your Stripe data in combination with your other business data.”

Snowflake and Amazon work with other third-party ETL providers, and Stripe declined to comment on what financial arrangements, if any, exist with these specific partnerships. It also declined to comment on whether it would be adding other data warehouse providers to that list.

“We’re always considering ways to expand our services and better serve our users, but don’t have any specific plans to share at this time,” said Shunturov. 

With the Amazon and Snowflake integrations, Stripe partnered with the two to use their respective data sharing technologies to build its product, he said. Specifically, Stripe initiates a data share that enables us to store the user’s Stripe data in the Stripe cluster and we then provide the user read access to this data. “This way, the user can access their data without giving write access to their cluster,” he said. “We are committed to continuously improve data freshness and expand the breadth of business-ready reports and metrics. Accomplishing this required that we build this capability natively on Stripe.”

Shunturov added that the impetus for the product, and perhaps the company’s strategic roadmap for how it’s building out these new wave of services overall, stems from requests from users.

“Stripe users, and especially larger users, have requested easier ways to not just export but continuously sync their Stripe data to their data warehouse so they can centralize their Stripe data with other business data without having to build or maintain an API integration themselves,” he said. “By making product-level reports and metrics available we are also significantly reducing the data engineering investment our users have to turn raw data into business insights. Snowflake and Amazon Redshift were selected as our initial launch partners due to high user demand. In fact, both were the most widely used data warehouses among the Stripe user community.”