Stripe launches Data Pipeline to help users sync payments data with Redshift and Snowflake

Payments processing giant Stripe has announced a new product designed to help users synchronize their financial data with Amazon Redshift and Snowflake.

In a software-centric world, companies of all sizes possess an arsenal of data which is usually spread across myriad silos, from customer support tools and CRM applications, to marketing and — in the case of Stripe — payments. Accessing all this data in their silos is easy, but gleaning deep insights by combining and querying different data sets in a centralized data warehouse is a different ball game.

Stripe Data Pipeline, as Stripe’s new product is called, is positioned to supplant existing mechanisms that companies may use to transport Stripe data into data warehouses, such as having to build an API integration in-house. This is a time-consuming endeavor that requires many engineering dollars, and even then, the inherent latency can hinder timely data access.

“Building an API integration from scratch requires multiple months and hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Stripe’s product lead Vladi Shunturov explained to VentureBeat. “Engineers also need to consistently monitor and update their homegrown solutions to support transaction updates, new datasets, schema changes and more. Stripe Data Pipeline can be set up within a few clicks and takes on all ongoing operational work.”

Native pipeline

It’s worth noting that companies can also use data integration platforms such as Airbyte which offer pre-built connectors to transform and transfer data from Stripe into Snowflake and Redshift. However, such ETL (extract, transform, load) integration tools can lead to “incomplete results,” given that they don’t support the full gamut of Stripe data. Indeed, ETL pipelines can only pull data from Stripe’s core REST API, whereas the Stripe Data Pipeline offers unfettered access to Stripe data such as that available via its reporting API, which delivers a host of “business-ready metrics,” according to Shunturov. This includes data relating to Interchange Cost Plus (IC+) fees, which is concerned with transactions and Stripe balance changes. It also means that companies can access revenue and financial reports out-of-the-box — directly from their data warehouse.

“This significantly reduces the amount of work our users need to do in order to transform their account and transaction data into meaningful reports, metrics and insights,” Shunturov said.

And so with its new Data Pipeline, Stripe is helping companies consolidate all their payments and financial data in their existing warehouses, so they can extract key business insights with fewer roadblocks. It’s worth noting that this functionality could be used by just about any team — a security and fraud unit at a food delivery platform, for example, could combine Stripe data with other business data to identify which restaurants may be most susceptible to fraud. Or analytics and product teams could find potential new growth opportunities by following the flow of payments through a customer’s entire lifecycle to figure out profitability, margin and ways to cut costs.

According to Stripe, businesses such as Zoom, Lime and HubSpot were already using Data Pipeline ahead of today’s formal launch. And in the future, there could be scope to extend support to other data warehouses, such as Databricks or BigQuery, though Stripe wouldn’t confirm plans.

“We’re actively looking at ways to enhance our product offering, but we don’t have any specific plans to share at this time,” Shunturov said.

Data Pipeline is available now to all Stripe customers in the U.S. who are also customers of Amazon Redshift or Snowflake’s Data Cloud.