Stripe

Wise

Stripe

Stripe charges a flat 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. That's it.

No setup fees, no monthly fees, no hidden charges. The simplicity is the product.

When a customer pays on a website using Stripe, Stripe handles everything — fraud detection, currency conversion, bank transfers, tax calculation, compliance. The merchant just sees money arrive in their account.

On top of the core payments, Stripe has built an entire financial infrastructure stack. Billing for subscriptions, Connect for marketplace payments, Atlas for incorporating a company, Issuing for creating virtual cards, Treasury for banking-as-a-service, and Radar for fraud prevention.

They're basically building the financial plumbing for the entire internet.

Wise

Wise charges a small, transparent fee on every transfer — typically 0.3-0.7% depending on the currency pair. That's it.

No hidden exchange rate markup, no receiving fees, no minimum amounts. The fee is shown upfront before you confirm the transfer, and Wise always uses the real mid-market exchange rate.

Banks typically charge 3-5% through hidden rate markups, making Wise roughly 8x cheaper. Wise also earns interest on customer balances held in the Wise account and on the float between receiving and settling transfers.

Stripe

Patrick Collison was 19. His brother John was 17.

They had already built and sold a company — Auctomatic, an eBay auction tool — for $5 million while still teenagers in Limerick, Ireland. Patrick went to MIT, John went to Harvard, and they both dropped out because they had a better idea.

The idea was embarrassingly obvious in hindsight. In 2010, accepting payments on the internet was a nightmare.

You had to get a merchant account, negotiate with a payment processor, deal with a gateway provider, handle PCI compliance, and write thousands of lines of code. It took weeks or months.

The Collisons thought it should take five minutes.

They built a simple API — seven lines of code — that let any developer start accepting credit card payments immediately. No merchant account.

No paperwork. No phone calls with banks.

Just paste seven lines of code and you're in business. They originally called it /dev/payments, then changed it to Stripe in 2011.

Peter Thiel and Elon Musk — the PayPal mafia — were among the first investors. Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz piled in soon after.

The Collisons had built exactly what every developer on Earth had been wishing for.

Wise

Kristo Käärmann was an Estonian working at Deloitte in London, getting paid in British pounds but needing to send money home to Estonia in euros. Every time he made a transfer, his bank skimmed 3-5% through hidden markups on the exchange rate.

Taavet Hinrikus had the opposite problem — he was Skype's first employee, getting paid in euros but living in London and needing pounds.

They came up with an elegantly simple hack. Käärmann would put pounds into Hinrikus's UK bank account.

Hinrikus would put the equivalent in euros into Käärmann's Estonian account. Both used the real mid-market exchange rate — the one you see on Google — with zero markup.

They were essentially matching currency needs without ever sending money across borders.

In 2011, they turned this hack into a company called TransferWise (rebranded to Wise in 2021). The product automated what they'd been doing manually — matching people who needed to send money in opposite directions and settling the transfers locally in each country.

When perfect matches weren't available, Wise used its own float to bridge the gap.

Stripe

Stripe grew almost entirely through developer love. They didn't hire a sales team for years.

They didn't run ads. They just built the best developer documentation anyone had ever seen and let word of mouth do the rest.

The developer-first strategy was deliberate. The Collisons realized that in a startup, the developer usually decides which payment provider to use.

If you make the developer happy, you win the company. Stripe's API documentation became legendary — clear, beautiful, with working code examples in every language.

They also grew by growing with their customers. Early Stripe customers included tiny startups that later became giants — Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, Shopify.

As those companies scaled to billions in revenue, Stripe's processing volume scaled with them. Stripe didn't need to acquire new customers because its existing ones kept getting bigger.

The international expansion was methodical. Instead of launching everywhere at once like Uber, Stripe carefully added country after country, making sure each one worked perfectly with local payment methods, currencies, and regulations.

By 2024 they were processing payments in 195 countries.

Wise

Wise grew through a combination of radical price transparency and media-savvy campaigning. Käärmann was unapologetically loud about how much banks were ripping people off.

Wise ran campaigns showing the exact markup banks charged versus Wise's fee. They published a "hidden fees calculator" that let people see how much their bank was stealing on international transfers.

Banks hated it. Customers loved it.

Word of mouth was enormous. Expats, immigrants, freelancers, and remote workers — anyone who sent money across borders regularly — told everyone they knew once they discovered Wise.

The savings were so dramatic (sometimes hundreds of dollars per transfer) that people couldn't help sharing.

The Wise Platform created a new growth vector. By licensing its infrastructure to banks and financial institutions, Wise got embedded into products used by millions of customers who had never heard of Wise.

When your bank offers "powered by Wise" international transfers, Wise grows without acquiring the customer directly.

Stripe

Valuation whiplash. In 2021, Stripe hit a peak valuation of $95 billion during the fintech boom.

By 2023, they had to mark it down to $50 billion during the tech correction — a 47% drop that made headlines everywhere. Employees who had been paper millionaires suddenly weren't.

The valuation has since recovered to $91 billion after a secondary share sale in 2025, but those two years were rough for morale.

Competition is relentless. Adyen, the Dutch payments company, has been eating into Stripe's enterprise market.

Square (now Block) competes on the small business side. PayPal is everywhere.

New fintech players pop up constantly. The payments business has razor-thin margins and everyone is fighting for the same 2.9%.

Going public is the elephant in the room. Stripe has been expected to IPO for years.

Investors, employees, and the media keep asking when. The Collisons have consistently said they're in no rush, but with $8.7 billion raised and thousands of employees holding stock options, the pressure to provide liquidity is enormous.

As of 2025, they've opted for secondary sales instead of a public offering.

Wise

Regulatory complexity across 60+ countries. Wise holds licenses in dozens of jurisdictions, each with different compliance requirements.

In 2023, Wise received a record £7.8 million fine from the UK's FCA for anti-money laundering control failures between 2020-2022. Käärmann himself was fined by the FCA for personal tax compliance issues.

For a company built on trust and transparency, regulatory problems hit the brand harder than they would for a traditional bank.

Growth is slowing as the easy gains are captured. Wise grew rapidly by converting customers away from overpriced bank transfers.

But as the most price-sensitive customers have already switched, finding new growth requires either expanding into new products (which dilutes focus) or new geographies (which adds regulatory complexity). Revenue growth has decelerated from 50%+ to the 20-30% range.

Competition from Revolut, PayPal, and traditional banks. Revolut now offers competitive exchange rates.

PayPal has improved its international pricing. Some banks have started matching Wise's rates for premium customers.

The "banks are ripping you off" message becomes less powerful when banks start charging less.

Stripe

Stripe Payments is the core — accept credit cards, debit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and 135+ payment methods in 195 countries. Stripe Connect lets marketplaces and platforms pay out to sellers (Shopify, Lyft, DoorDash all use it).

Stripe Billing handles subscription and recurring billing. Stripe Atlas lets you incorporate a US company from anywhere in the world — fill out a form, get a Delaware C-corp, bank account, and tax ID in days.

Stripe Radar uses machine learning to block fraud in real time. Stripe Treasury lets platforms offer banking services to their customers.

Stripe Tax automatically calculates and collects sales tax in every jurisdiction.

Wise

Wise International Transfers is the core — send money to 160+ countries in 40+ currencies at the real exchange rate. The Wise Account is a multi-currency account that holds 40+ currencies with local bank details in major markets (USD, GBP, EUR, AUD).

The Wise Business Account serves companies with international payroll, batch payments, and multi-currency management. The Wise Card is a debit card that automatically converts at the mid-market rate when you spend abroad.

Wise Platform is a B2B API that lets banks and businesses embed Wise transfers into their own products — major banks like Monzo and N26 use it.

Stripe

Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Tiger Global, GV (Google Ventures), Goldman Sachs, Baillie Gifford

Wise

Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures, IVP, Lead Edge Capital, Baillie Gifford, Richard Branson