Stripe, a financial infrastructure platform for businesses, today announced a range of product and partnership updates for businesses operating in France. This represents Stripe’s largest set of new products for the French market since launching in the country in 2016.

New advanced payments solutions for French businesses on Stripe

Starting this summer, Alma, the leading buy now, pay later (BNPL) provider in France with over 4 million active users, will be available as a payment method for all Stripe users. It can be turned on directly from the Stripe Dashboard with no code required. Alma is one of 100 payment methods available in Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite (OCS), including Apple Pay, PayPal, and Alipay. French retailer La Redoute has more than $1 billion in annual revenue, and immediately unlocked 2% of additional income, simply by switching to OCS.

New Stripe Terminal features to help French businesses unify online and offline commerce

Stripe is accelerating the deployment of Stripe Terminal’s unified commerce capabilities in France. Planity, Frichti, and Hertz already use Terminal to unify their online and offline revenue streams. Highlights include:

• Stripe's latest smart reader, Stripe Reader S700, is now available in France. The S700 provides a fully customizable platform for bespoke commerce experiences like taking orders, offering loyalty programs, collecting customer information, and more. For example, a restaurant might want to customize the S700 for preset tableside orders, payments, and tips, while a fitness studio might want to accept payments for single classes and offer membership options to their customers.
  
• Stripe has introduced a pre-built integration with Cegid, a leading retail unified commerce point-of-sale solution. Businesses using Cegid can now easily use Terminal to collect in-person payments without writing any code.
  
• Later this year, Stripe will enable CB on Terminal, helping merchants optimize cost and conversion seamlessly either via Visa, Mastercard, and CB, whether customers are paying with Apple Pay, a credit card, or their favorite payment method.
  

A deeper partnership with CB

Stripe is strengthening its partnership with CB, France’s leading payment system, which handles 15 billion transactions per year.

• Stripe now natively supports CB on Apple Pay, enabling French businesses—from local retailers to multinationals operating in France—to maximize payment acceptance and conversion rates with a cost-effective integration.
  
• Stripe now offers its users the ability to capture funds multiple times on CB with a single authentication. This will allow businesses to capture a customer’s payment once while maintaining the flexibility to issue partial refunds, fulfill parts of the orders as soon as the first item is ready to ship, or—in the case of platforms—pay each seller as they fulfill their part of an order.
  
• In the coming months, Stripe will offer extended authorization on CB. This is particularly relevant for businesses such as hotels or car rental companies that have long periods between taking an order and charging customers.
  

“We are extremely proud of this partnership with Stripe. We welcome the efforts made by Stripe to innovate and generate value for French businesses and enterprises selling into France,” said Loÿs Moulin, head of development at CB.

Stripe’s momentum in France is accelerating

Since launching in France in 2016, Stripe has supported over 100,000 French businesses looking to accelerate their growth. Each day, hundreds of French businesses, from century-old companies to solopreneurs, join the Stripe network—a 75% increase from pandemic highs.

Major French enterprises such as Accor, TF1, La Redoute, and RMC Sport have recently become Stripe users, along with AI leader Mistral. They join earlier adopters like Photoroom, Nabla, Hugging Face, and Dust. The number of French AI businesses on Stripe has more than quadrupled between 2021 and 2023, and Paris is now the top hub for AI startups in the European Union, as counted by AI businesses on Stripe.

“France is having an AI renaissance, and that wave of innovation is spreading across more traditional companies. We’re proud to now work with more than 50% of CAC40 companies to help them rewire their finance stack,” said Stripe cofounder and president John Collison.