Stripe’s new Atlas service will try to make it easier to incorporate a business and start accepting payments from anywhere in the world. Atlas helps incorporate a U.S Delaware company, open a US bank account with a Silicon Valley Bank and accept online payments by using Stripe. It also includes tax and legal guidance. The company just recently announced this initiative.
For Thrinacia this is a very important step in facilitating easier and more streamlined access for all of it’s customers worldwide. Thrinacia uses Stripe as it’s primary payment processor and website owners or website administrators have to sign up for Stripe account in order to receive funds from their crowdfunding website.
Some of the website owners or project creators were not able to sign up for Stripe account previously, because they were not in a Stripe supported country. However the process will now become much easier in those countries where Stripe is not available yet and allow those users to use Stripe services.
Website owners and project creators located in countries not supported by Stripe will now be able to easily setup bank accounts via Stripe Atlas service, sign up for Stripe payment processing service and receive funds in their bank accounts. This represents a major shift in regards to which payment processor a company or individual may choose to use in the future.
Stripe’s core belief is that people who want to do business with Stripe should be able to, without the difficult process that is usually involved if you are a person located outside of Stripe supported country. Right now the service is invite only, but eventually it will scale and become available to a larger audience with various international hubs to handle setup.
To encourage more sign-ups, Stripe says that Atlas will be free for the first 100 users. After that there will be one time fee of $500 which includes all the fees associated with incorporating the company and setting up a US bank account in Silicon Valley Bank.
The new service will help online business in developing countries go global. It presents them a route to start a tech business and take advantage of its potential on equal footing with a company based in Silicon Valley, said Patrick Collison co-founder and chief executive of Stripe.
Collison also mentioned that the idea for Atlas came about after he noticed companies using Stripe in countries where it was not operating. When Stripe investigated the matter further it discovered many companies going to the extraordinary lengths to set up operations in the U.S. and Europe in order to be able to use Stripe to process online payments.