There’s smart and then there is, as they say up in Boston, wicked smart. Stripe is wicked smart. Rather than attack payments as a consumer play (like a Square) or a commercial play (like a Chase Paymentech), Stripe discerned that it could be the payments provider at the source of it — the code level. This required a whole lot of deep, well, painful, learning about how payments work and how payments in software coding need to work. And despite a feisty competitor or two, such as Balanced, Stripe has made good on its goal of being the payments “Intel Inside” for countless financial services ventures. We only wonder why the traditional banking community continues to let Stripe sink its claws into startup after startup. Be that as it may, Stripe adds up to a venture that is becoming the most fundamental to payments in the New Economy, and if you don’t think that’s cool, you’re, well, Square.

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