(Bloomberg) -- Stripe Inc. is making it easier for merchants to use its financial-services offerings with the technology they already have to process payments.

Companies will no longer be locked in to processing payments with Stripe to access its other products, the firm said. Merchants can use other payments providers — such as Adyen NV or PayPal Holdings Inc. — while also using Stripe’s billing and tax capabilities, for example.

“We’re extending our modularity to the very core of Stripe: payments processing,” Chief Product Officer Will Gaybrick said Wednesday at the company’s annual conference in San Francisco. “All of Stripe’s products will gracefully inter-operate with third-party processors.”

Stripe enables businesses to accept payments both in person and online, and also provides services such as sending payouts and automating businesses’ financial processes. There are now more than 100 companies that process at least $1 billion annually by using Stripe products.

Decoupling payment processing from the firm’s other capabilities is attractive for larger enterprises that may be restricted by long-term contract commitments, Stripe said in a statement.

“As we’ve gotten into these larger and larger customers, they have more constraints, you’re dealing with different parts of the organization, and so this makes it easy to adopt the best parts of Stripe,” billionaire John Collison, who founded the company with his brother Patrick, said in an interview.

The firm counts PayPal and Adyen as competitors, and Wednesday’s announcement could further stoke those rivalries.

“It raises the level of competition across the payment processing/financial services industry, as merchants can now enjoy Stripe’s vast financial services product suite even if they do payment processing with another provider,” Mizuho Securities USA analyst Ryan Coyne said in an email.

Among a slew of other product updates, Stripe also said American Express Co. joined its enhanced issuer network, a set of partnerships with US card issuers including Capital One Financial Corp. and Discover Financial Services that it set up in 2023 to help reduce fraud and increase payment authorization rates for businesses.

Read More: Hertz Taps Fintech Stripe for Processing of Rental-Car Payments

Stripe’s valuation increased to $65 billion in February from $50 billion in 2023 after it struck a deal allowing current and former employees to cash out some of their shares. That move may have alleviated some pressure on the startup to speed its path to an initial public offering.

There “isn’t a number on the wall” that the firm is aiming to hit before the IPO chatter resumes, Collison said, adding that Stripe isn’t focusing on valuation.

“We think about it briefly once a year when you have a tender offer for employees, and then we go back to not thinking about it, and we think a lot about the business metrics,” he said.

Stripe’s total payment volume surged 25% last year to surpass $1 trillion, and it expects an annual revenue run rate of more than $500 million over the next year for its revenue-automation business. Stripe products are now available to businesses in 46 countries.

“People think that payments is a stodgy, slow-moving space,” Collison said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.” 

--With assistance from Erin Fuchs.

(Updates with founder, analyst comments starting in sixth paragraph.)

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