Insights & discussion with Stripe: We hosted Stripe’s Head of Platform Sales for North America, who shared a presentation around Stripe’s commerce enablement platform, highlighting the multiple monetization opportunities for SaaS businesses in embedding payments and financial services into their offerings. Additionally, the event featured a panel discussion including two Stripe users (SportsEngine and Wix), along with additional experts providing both a VC (GI Partners) and public equity (T. Rowe Price) investor perspective. In our research, we consistently identify software-led payments and eCommerce & omnichannel payments as the two swimlanes that will drive the vast majority of the growth within our sector (with an even greater concentration post-COVID). Given Stripe’s success at addressing these two areas, we believe it is important for investors to be kept abreast of the company’s evolving offerings. Further, we believe many public equity investors tend to underappreciate Stripe’s global scale and leading ability to serve the most complex enterprise customers, particularly as it pertains to competitive dynamics vs. Adyen, PayPal (Braintree), Fiserv (First Data), FIS (Worldpay), Global Payments, etc.  Stipe Connect serves as an attractive alternative available to SaaS businesses in monetizing payments & financial services:  As we note in our prior research, SaaS businesses have an array of options available to them in terms of monetizing payments, beginning with the traditional integrated payments revenue share on one end of the spectrum, ranging to the full-fledged PayFac option on the other end. However, we also highlight attractive alternatives that can allow SaaS businesses to both benefit from the monetization of payments & financial services (which in the case of Stripe, can be realized via numerous “beyond payments” offerings such as Issuing, Capital, payouts, card present, hardware, invoicing, subscription billing, additional services, etc.) and retain significant control over their customer’s experience, but without the substantial upfront investment and ongoing costs (e.g., regulatory compliance upkeep, opportunity cost of R&D investment) required to maintain the capability. Further, partnering with Stripe allows the platform to “future proof” its payments & financial services offering by leveraging Stripe’s global scale and cadence of innovation.  Stripe is a leader (and gaining meaningful share) in the enterprise segment: Stripe has become a leading merchant payment provider for enterprise customers. Stripe now sources the majority of its “hundreds of billions” in volume (as of September 2019) via the enterprise segment, and counts 40+ users with $1b+ in annual volumes – with Stripe’s total enterprise-related volumes growing ~100% YoY. We note that Stripe ranked number one in the recent Forrester Wave report with the strongest “current offering” and strongest “strategy”. The report noted that Stripe is particularly successful at creating algorithms to improve authorization rates, developing cutting-edge innovations and technology, and providing merchants with powerful reporting tools. Notably, Stripe was the only provider to receive a 5 out of 5 score in the “payments for platforms and marketplaces” category, a new category in Forrester’s analysis (suggestive of where the market is heading).