This week Stripe launched two new major products in their ever-expanding mission to build the economic and financial backbone for the internet.

Ben Thompson was one of two (along with the Wall Street Journal) to have embargoed early access to their launch of Stripe Treasury, their latest major product category. This interview with Stripe co-founder John Collison dives into the background on the product launches, Stripe’s strategy, and where these fit into the wider Stripe mission.

They’re extending their Capital product, which originally launched in 2019 to give Stripe customers access to capital for running their businesses, to their customers’ customers — as Thompson described: “building a platform of platforms.”

But Treasury is the big deal. It provides what they call “banking-as-a-service”; developers can now embed full financial services into their products, using Stripe’s passthrough platform APIs to generate bank accounts and perform other financial transaction types. The key component here is not only that they’re making it instantaneous to set up financial infrastructure through their banking partner network, but also extending that toolkit to the customers of customers, to allow building financial products on top of the Stripe platform.

John mentions in the interview that they’ve been describing this intent for years, calling the company a “payments and treasury network.” I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that they meant what they said, even though it sounded absurdly ambitious at the time. Don’t underestimate Stripe.