Stripe and Celonis: How the two will create mutual value

Celonis will use Stripe's payment technology to power its Execution Management System (EMS) marketplace and take the friction out of the company's free trial and app purchase processes. Meanwhile, Stripe will use Celonis to continually improve the speed and quality of its customer onboarding process.

This first phase of the Celonis-Stripe collaboration will lead to more integrations as well as opportunities to streamline additional processes for each company and their customers.

The two companies have a bit of a mind meld when it comes to bringing their technologies and specialties to businesses of all sizes. Stripe has global reach across 46 countries and has built financial infrastructure-as-a-service that helps  both startups and very large enterprises to grow their revenue and transform their business model. Nearly 1 million European businesses are now running on the company’s software and hundreds of millions of Europeans are regularly purchasing through Stripe seamlessly.

"Stripe redefines payments with new payment infrastructure," said Miguel Milano, co-owner and Chief Revenue Officer at Celonis. "Stripe redesigned a payment infrastructure for the Internet era for enterprises." 

Celonis aims to democratize the use of process data, intelligence and automation for businesses of all sizes. Like Stripe, Celonis taps into multiple systems to give customers a real-world view of processes and the playbook to become more efficient.

Stripe and Celonis also have multiple joint enterprise customers. The overlapping customer bases and missions might yield a bevy of collaborative use cases as well as value.

I caught up with Eileen O’Mara, Head of EMEA Revenue & Growth at Stripe, and Milano to talk about the partnership and where it's going over time.

Here are a few highlights from our chat.

Overlapping visions. Both O'Mara and Milano returned to themes of delivering value, simplifying the complicated, and democratizing technology during our conversation. O'Mara said Stripe is "democratic in our approach to power the largest enterprises to the smallest startups. We are absolutely focused on users first." That focus is why Stripe is using Celonis to streamline the onboarding process for customers. The faster a Stripe customer can onboard, the faster that merchant will see value.

Milano said Celonis has a very similar take on simplification and delivering value. "We help companies reveal and fix inefficiencies they can’t see. We make the invisible, visible. (And we fix it)," he said.

O'Mara also said the companies' operating principles align. Stripe's core principles revolve around urgency, focus and being meticulous at your craft, while Celonis emphasizes living for customer value and that the best team wins.

Commerce everywhere. O'Mara noted that digital commerce is still a small percentage of business conducted. Only 14% of commerce is done online and reducing that friction is key to moving more business activity online. She added that Stripe is providing "the opportunity to monetize every interaction on the internet."

Indeed, Milano said Stripe will be an enabler to scale the EMS app marketplace. Today, the EMS Marketplace has dozens of applications with massive scale ahead. "Today, we can't monetize that. A company has to call the individual company that made the app to do an offline transaction to use it," he explained. Stripe will simplify the EMS Marketplace purchase process. Stripe's platform will also help track consumption-based monetization models from Celonis. "We have a new set of non-linear models of growth that we believe can only be enacted with the next-gen of payment tech. Enter Stripe," said Milano.

"We believe we are in a new era of the Internet. Up to now, it's mostly been driven around eyeballs and advertising and the shift is to commerce and high exchange of value," said O'Mara. "That's what we're about."

The road ahead. Both executives noted that the partnership between Stripe and Celonis is just getting started. 

"We see a huge opportunity to bring value to each other. I'd say this is stage one," said O'Mara. "In six months or a year's time, my expectation is that we'll be deeply engaged with each other. These are two upstart startup companies that are doing amazing things on a global stage, so I think we're rooting for each other."

Stay tuned.

Larry Dignan

Editor in Chief (former)

Larry Dignan is the former Editor in Chief of Celonis Media. Before joining Celonis, he was Editor in Chief of ZDNet and has covered the technology industry and transformation trends for more than two decades, publishing articles in WallStreetWeek.com, Inter@ctive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning magazine.