Insights: From stablecoins to AI agents - how Stripe is changing the internet economy

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
The 2026 Chevy Equinox is more than an SUV. It's your Sunday tailgate and your parking lot snack bar. Your lucky jersey, your chairs, and your big cooler fit perfectly in your even bigger cargo space. And when it's go time, your 11.3-inch diagonal touch screens got the playbook, the playlist, and the tech to stay a step ahead. It's more than an SUV. It's your Equinox.
Chevrolet, together let's drive.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:30)
When you finally find your thing, you want the whole world to know about that thing. So you use a thing called Canva to make it an even bigger and better thing.
Whether you want to create flyers for that thing, make presentations for that thing, or design merch for that thing, you can do anything. So people can see your thing, feel your thing, love your thing. The next thing you know, it's a thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing.

**Benjamin Ensor** (1:15)
Welcome to Fintech Insider Insights, recorded live at Stripe Tour London. I'm Benjamin Ensor, Director of Research and Strategy at 11FS. Over the past two decades, digital payments have transformed how businesses move money. But for most companies, the financial and operational challenges have always been much wider than just the payments themselves. Today, larger businesses are thinking about liquidity, treasury, global money movement, and how new technologies like stable coins fit into that picture. At the same time, artificial intelligence is poised to reshape how and where digital commerce happens, raising entirely new questions about how payments work when AI agents start acting on behalf of customers.
So in today's special episode, we're exploring both of these themes with two guests from Stripe.
So I'm delighted to be joined by Neetika Bansal, Head of Money Management and Crypto at Stripe. Welcome to Fintech Insider.

**Neetika Bansal** (2:11)
Thank you.

**Benjamin Ensor** (2:12)
Thank you so much for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit about you and your role at Stripe?

**Neetika Bansal** (2:17)
Yeah. Hi. Firstly, thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be here. I've been at Stripe for the past eight years.
Now in my most recent role, I manage an organization that looks after some of our most complex businesses, so platforms and marketplaces. I manage everything to do with how money moves around the world, and I also manage our crypto offerings. This is a role that spans product, engineering, operations, strategy, and it's around a team of 800 people around the world, so it's really exciting.

**Benjamin Ensor** (2:44)
So it's a huge role.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:47)
Yes.

**Benjamin Ensor** (2:47)
A huge organization.
So now Stripe has evolved a lot since 2011, since it was started as a payments company. Businesses have always been looking for more than payments acceptance. But from your perspective, what are you seeing as the biggest changes in how businesses are thinking about money and cash management today? How has that sort of changed?

**Neetika Bansal** (3:07)
So there is one big change that we are seeing. Earlier, if you think about it, businesses had to be a certain size to even contemplate going global.
Now, businesses are going global from day one. We talk about the AI companies, there are a large number of AI companies getting started on a daily basis, and these companies are selling to something like 100 geographies from day one. You look at a company like Mid Journey, Mid Journey is selling to 200 geographies from day one. So all of these global companies have global revenue coming from many different geographies, and they need a way to manage this revenue. They need a way to handle the multiple currencies that their money is settling in.
They need a way to convert these currencies, they need a way to then pay their global workforce, their contractors, their vendors, their suppliers around the world. So the needs have evolved from just being a payments processing company, to being a full stack infrastructure provider, a full stack provider. And this is why we built Treasury, which is our product, which helps companies sort of manage their financial operations on Stripe.

**Benjamin Ensor** (4:10)
And of course, it's much more complicated when you're managing multiple currencies and accepting multiple currencies.

**Neetika Bansal** (4:14)
Exactly.

**Benjamin Ensor** (4:15)
Yeah, exactly. Okay. And where are the biggest friction points for Stripe's businesses today? What are the most challenging aspects? Is it fraud? Is it money movement, settlement delays?
What are the biggest friction points you're hearing and trying to solve?

**Neetika Bansal** (4:31)
So all of that, for sure.
And I think the way I would describe this is, if you think about money, money is kind of stuck in the pre-internet era, right? Everything on the internet moves really fast except for money. And so that's where most of the friction comes from. Companies find it extremely hard to move money cross-border. If you think about how, like if you think about these companies accepting payments and doing more with their money, all of that happens on disparate systems. So if a company is operating in 15 geographies, they have to think about 15 partners if not more. And so there's a fragmentation that they have to account for. And so just operating cross-border, operating globally is a huge problem.