Dive Brief:

• Stripe, the 11-year-old company that has enabled businesses to take payments online, said in a press release that it has agreed to buy Recko, an Indian software company that automates the accounting process of reconciling payments. A spokesperson for Stripe declined to disclose financial details of the transaction.
• Recko, founded by two entrepreneurs in 2017, was designed to aid internet merchants in monitoring their payments by reconciling large amounts of transactional data. The company now operates globally, with customers that include British online food delivery company Deliveroo, Indian e-commerce marketplace Meesho and Indian online pharmacy company PharmEasy, according to the release.
• “Stripe helps millions of businesses around the world streamline their revenue management—from subscriptions and invoicing to revenue recognition and bookkeeping," Stripe Chief Product Officer Will Gaybrick said in the release. "With Recko, we’ll automate their payments reconciliation, a critical input into their overall financial health.”

Dive Insight:

Privately held Stripe, with dual headquarters in Dublin and San Francisco, is investing across the business landscape, also acquiring online fraud prevention company Bouncer and cloud-based tax services firm TaxJar earlier this year, and this month turning its attention to building a cryptocurrency team. 

The release explains the importance of the latest acquisition, saying Recko will allow Stripe's customers to better track their payments, and ultimately better manage their businesses. The process of reconciliation, which matches transactions across ledgers, can be time-consuming and tedious, but pays dividends when done properly.

"Finance teams perform reconciliation to uncover discrepancies, avoid incorrect accounting and understand a company’s financial health at a point in time," the release says.

Bangalore-based Recko can assess a company's payment processing with data gathered from emails and other documents; manage fees, currency conversions and refunds; and produce sharable reconciliation reports, according to the release.

Recko co-founder Saurya Prakash Sinha is the company's CEO. “Joining Stripe is a perfect next chapter for Recko, and we can’t wait to help grow the GDP of the internet by removing the burden of reconciliation complexity," he said in the release.

The Recko acquisition is part of Stripe's ongoing campaign to invest in India, including adding IT assets there and "rapid local hiring," the release said. India has the sixth-largest economy in the world and has the second-largest population, according to the World Bank.

Stripe also reached into Africa last year with the acquisition of Nigerian fintech Paystack, which this year expanded into South Africa.

Stripe was founded in 2010 by a pair of Irish brothers who created a better mousetrap for businesses looking to accept payments over the internet. Now, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and President John Collison, both in their early 30s, have piled up $2.2 billion in capital, according to Crunchbase, to drive acquisitions, expansion and investments. And along the way, the company captured a $95-billion valuation. 

The company is part of a burgeoning band of fintechs seeking to disintermediate the traditional banking and financial service industries by offering digitally based products and software that are faster and simpler to use. Such startups have been raising record amounts of venture money this year and driving increased deal-making as well.

While Stripe gained traction initially by attracting business from startups, including Shopify, Grab and Spotify, it has also landed bigger, more established companies as clients, including Amazon and Google. 

Stripe makes a simple web site pitch touting its payments software and application programming interfaces. "A complete payments platform, engineered for growth: Accept payments and move money globally with Stripe’s powerful APIs and software solutions designed to help you capture more revenue," is Stripe's homepage promotion.

The company says it is available for business in 46 countries. It now operates from 14 offices around the world, including New York, Chicago, Mexico City, Singapore, Tokyo and Paris, with about 4,000 employees, according to its web site.

Recko's customers will continue to be able to access its products directly, according to the release. The spokesperson for Stripe declined to say how many employees Recko has, or how many workers Stripe may already have in India.