Karl Durrance – Stripe Tour Sydney 2026.

Karl Durrance is Managing Director for Australia and New Zealand at Stripe, the payments infrastructure company. Australia NZ is Stripes 3rd largest region globally, serving over one million customers and onboards 37,000 new local businesses every month. 

In this episode of Fintech Chatter, recorded live at Stripe Tour Sydney, Karl explains how Australia became Stripe’s third biggest market in the world, why 23 percent of Stripe’s Australian businesses sell cross-border against a national average of 2 percent, and what the AI economy is doing to business formation.

Stripe in Australia.

Stripe launched in Australia in 2014. For most of the period since, it sold to startups and small business, where Karl says the product fit was strong from early on. The segment that has grown fastest recently is large enterprise, and this is the part that surprised him.

About Karl Durrance.

He also talks candidly about the country manager role, why he coaches his team to answer for the customer rather than the forecast, and where Stripe is hiring in Australia.

In March 2026 Stripe turned its Sydney office into a global engineering hub, which Karl called a core engineering office for the company at the time.

0:00 Introduction
1:24 Stripe Tour Sydney
2:36 One million ANZ customers
3:49 Cracking the Australian market
5:30 Cross-border and global reach
6:24 Solopreneurs and small business
8:08 AI and job creation
9:29 Day 231 of the singularity
11:11 Building the highways
13:05 Growing the GDP of the internet
14:37 Why Karl joined Stripe
18:12 The country manager role
21:36 How founders reach Stripe
22:26 Careers at Stripe

Karl Durrance on LinkedIn: https://au.linkedin.com/in/karldurrance
Stripe: https://stripe.com
Stripe Tour Sydney: https://stripetour.com/sydney
Stripe Tour Sydney 2026 announcements: https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/tour-sydney-2026
Careers at Stripe: https://stripe.com/jobs
Tier One People: https://tieronepeople.com
Dexter Cousins on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dextercousins/

Full transcript.

Lightly edited for readability — filler words removed, wording otherwise unchanged. Timestamps match the audio.

Dexter Cousins 00:01
Hello and welcome to Fintech Chatter, the show where I connect with fintech leaders to talk about their secrets to success. I’m Dexter Cousins, your host and the founder of Tier One People, the executive search firm that’s been working with fintech companies like today’s guest to find that 1% who redefine what’s possible. Today’s guest is special. I’m coming at you from Stripe Tour here in Sydney, joined by Karl Durrance, Managing Director for Stripe Australia and New Zealand.

Karl Durrance 00:30
Thanks for having me on.

Dexter Cousins 00:31
It’s fantastic to have you on. I can’t believe it — 370-plus episodes and it’s the first time we’ve had Stripe on. I am absolutely ashamed.

Karl Durrance 00:40
Hopefully not the last.

Dexter Cousins 00:42
Hopefully not. What an amazing event. So many people from the industry here who are curious, interested, engaged. Tell us about Stripe Tour, and then we’ll talk about Stripe and your role here in Oz.

Karl Durrance 01:07
This is our annual customer conference. We’ve got just over two thousand businesses represented today and we’re going through a whole bunch of topics. We educate on our products, but the big focus area this year is discussing the opportunities being presented by the AI economy.

Dexter Cousins 01:53
There’s a lot to talk through about the future. I think there were about 800 product announcements today.

Karl Durrance 01:59
Not quite 800.

Dexter Cousins 02:01
It felt like that. But I want to talk about the origins of Stripe in Oz, because you’ve been here for over a decade.

Karl Durrance 02:08
Twelve years this year.

Dexter Cousins 02:09
And over a million customers, I believe.

Karl Durrance 02:14
Yes.

Dexter Cousins 02:15
Two hundred billion in payments transacted through Australian companies.

Karl Durrance 02:19
As an aggregate number — that was a number we talked through last year. But from a feet-on-the-street perspective, servicing domestic use cases, twelve years this year, it’s growing at an incredible clip. Historically we’ve had great product-market fit servicing startups and small business. What has grown fastest is extending that proposition into large business and enterprise. What’s surprising is how fast that’s grown.

When we looked back at our decade anniversary, at Stripe Tour I announced we had over 500,000 customers. A year later I announced we had over a million — and these are local customers. Not global. Australia and New Zealand businesses. It gives you an indication of the speed of growth. And here at Stripe Tour today, I announced that over the last twelve months we’ve onboarded 37,000 new businesses a month. Incredible speed in the number of businesses moving to Stripe right now.

Dexter Cousins 03:33
If I think through the general advice a founder here in Australia would get in fintech, the first thing they’re told is you’ve got to think global, you’ve got to go to the US. It’s a difficult market to crack here to get that level of traction. How has Stripe managed to penetrate the Australian market, be here for the long distance, and get those numbers? Any domestic fintech would be the top dog with them.

Karl Durrance 04:09
There are a few contributors. Aussies tend to adopt technology quickly, and that’s not Stripe-exclusive. We’re further away, we’ve got a more constrained talent market, and to be competitive Aussie businesses need to lean in hard. We’ve always adopted technology quickly, and that’s helped us from a momentum perspective.

We’ve also had exceptionally good product-market fit here serving businesses to accept base payments. Australia is a very card-heavy nation in paying for goods and services, and we happen to be very good at that. That’s driven a lot of growth.

Thirdly, because we have a global footprint, we’re helping Aussie businesses reach the rest of the world. A stat I shared this morning in the keynote: when we look at the Australian business at Stripe, 23% of the businesses are selling cross-border. They’re not servicing a domestic use case, they’re going after the global opportunity. If we look holistically at businesses in Australia, only 2% sell cross-border. So we have a 10x multiple on the Australian average for Stripe users going abroad.

Part of that could be that a lot of the businesses that use us are digitally centric, and going global as a digital business is inherently easier than as a traditional business. We’ve got that affinity too. Those three things have led to Australia being a breakout region for Stripe. It’s the third biggest market in the world for Stripe. It points out that Australia as a business population is punching way above its weight on tech adoption, and on fintech evolution.

Dexter Cousins 06:08
As a country of 27 million people, we’ve got 2.5 million small businesses and business owners. You’ve got nearly half of that.

Karl Durrance 06:18
It depends how you measure it. What’s awesome is that many of our customers are solopreneurs. They could be starting a side hustle, so they don’t need to be the classic small business. The small business numbers can be an underbaked version of how much commerce is happening with these solopreneurs.

What’s interesting about business at the moment is the net explosion of new businesses being formed. We’re seeing it in the data, primarily fuelled by the AI economy — businesses are getting vibe-coded now. We did a demo in the keynote where one of my architects spoke to Claude with an idea: I want to create a cooking recipe website and I want to monetise it. Within about a minute it had spun up a website, organised a large language model for natural language search, and allowed the acceptance of payments for that business to monetise.

In the past that would be impossible. The AI economy is accelerating business growth. What we’re going to see is more small businesses formed than ever before. A lot of those will be micro businesses, and many of them are choosing Stripe — either humans choosing Stripe, or agents choosing Stripe in the formation of the business. A super interesting time.

Dexter Cousins 07:51
I want to talk on that point more, around AI and job creation. We came from the keynote fireside chat with Cliff and John. John asked a few times about the stigma that comes with AI around it taking jobs. If I look at my network and think of the founders — ten years back when I started my business, Nick at Afterpay, Larry at Zip — when they said they were going to build a unicorn business, they’d have thousands of people. Now I speak to people like that and they think, I’d build the same thing if not better with about 200 people.

What I love about what you’ve said is this question we’ve got about what jobs AI will create. Maybe that’s the wrong question. Maybe it’s, what business will AI enable me to create where I don’t need somebody to employ me? That’s struck me about the event here. It’s almost like this is the birth of the digital age, and what we’ve seen up to this point has been analogue on a computer. How do you feel about the future at Stripe, and talk to me about that agentic commerce piece?

Karl Durrance 09:12
Going back to the analogue-to-digital moment — I had a tongue-in-cheek comment in the keynote that we’re now day 231 of the singularity. The singularity represents the moment where AI enables rapid business creation, innovation at a speed unknown prior. We’re at the beginning of something exponential, and we’re seeing that in the numbers.

It’s hard to predict when things start, but when graphs that normally go up like this start inflecting in an outsized way, something’s happening. From the perspective of the analogue-to-digital analogy, we’re now going digital to AI, and that’s the next moment we’re all going to remember. Do you remember that time when everything started exploding and there was this talk track around, the bots are coming for everyone’s jobs?

What we’re going to find is that a huge number of businesses will be created. There’s loads of work to do, and many of the things agents are doing are highly constrained. We’ve never been able to get enough software developers to build all the things we want to build. We have an endless list of things we need to build at Stripe. Agents might help us build more efficiently, but we’re never going to run out of things to build, and we still need software developers. We’re going to find this spins the flywheel faster.

Dexter Cousins 10:54
We’re at the beginning. This was the gold rush — it strikes me that Stripe’s building the rails, they’ve got the picks and the shovels.

Karl Durrance 11:06
One of our founders, Patrick Collison, shares an analogy — more of a teenage boy analogy. Growing up in your bedroom, you might have pictures of Lamborghinis and Ferraris and Porsches on your wall. It would be rare to have a picture of a highway, and worship the highway and go, how cool is the highway?

But at Stripe, we’re building the highways the fastest businesses drive on. We are the digital version of that, and we obsess over building the best highways so these businesses can run as fast as they can. Less picks and shovels, more an infrastructure play — roads and freeways and highways, so businesses can run faster and drive faster.

Dexter Cousins 11:59
We’re at an inflection point. Bumping into old friends and colleagues in the industry, whether they’re in crypto, blockchain, payments, it seems everybody’s congregating. It feels like fintech has become one homogenous collective, rather than regtech and insurtech and all these other things.

How does Stripe see that whole ecosystem? If I look at the news and some of the plays you’ve made around acquisitions, stablecoins — the PayPal move is in the news as well. How does Stripe see its role in the fintech ecosystem, and what part is it playing?

Karl Durrance 12:49
Our mission is to grow the GDP of the internet. Ultimately it should be, how do we accelerate money movement and create revenue opportunities for businesses? Speeding up the movement of money increases the GDP of the internet. Any time a dollar is stranded between point A and point B, that dollar can’t be spent, can’t be used in the economy. The more we can make it agile, faster, more useful, the more it increases the GDP of the internet.

A lot of this is working back from what our customers tell us. We started with simple payment acceptance on the internet because our founders had started a business prior and found one of the hardest things to do was get paid by customers on the internet. When they exited that business they thought, hang on, maybe lots of founders have this problem. Let’s build for where the problem is.

We continued to evolve past that. Maybe it’s not just payments. Maybe there’s the management and movement of money, stored value, the issuing of credit cards — all things still linked to the finance department, still linked to revenue, but well beyond payments. We’re going to continue doing that, where our customers tell us there’s a need or utility for us to extend into a space that isn’t being served well. Then we can go in and do a better job than the traditional incumbents.

Dexter Cousins 14:20
There’s a great lesson there — rather than chasing what’s latest, because we have so many of them in this industry: AI, stablecoins, crypto. We’ve seen businesses chase that investor money rather than the North Star of what is our mission. This will sound like a banal question given everything you’ve shared, but what attracted you to Stripe when you joined?

Karl Durrance 14:53
You haven’t figured that out yet?

Dexter Cousins 14:54
That’s why I said it’s a banal question.

Karl Durrance 14:58
To be fair, I didn’t know as much about Stripe before I joined as I know now. I’m in my fifth year at Stripe and loving every minute. Historically the businesses I’ve worked for have had some sort of scaled tech proposition. I did ten years at AWS and enjoyed the broadness of the platform, startup through to enterprise, very similar to Stripe’s proposition. I loved that it was a disruptive technology at the time, because it was offering a different commercial model and technology to traditional physical servers and data centres — you can buy flexible access to infrastructure.

After ten years I started looking at what the next move was. When I saw what Stripe was doing, it had some of those similarities I enjoyed. I love the breadth of it — in one hour I can speak to a founder, and the next I could be speaking to a large enterprise. That diversity of engagement and ubiquity of value is unique. There aren’t many companies that democratise access to services like that. That drew me in. Then the mission, the values — a very purpose-driven company.

And the fixation on creating beautiful products, obsessing over that. It’s not about releasing minimum viable products, getting them to market as fast as possible and working out how to crank the wheel. It’s, let’s release products customers are not only asking for, that they’re going to enjoy, that solve a problem in a beautiful way — and us obsessing about that. It drives a degree of high quality, a degree of ownership in the sector.

The chance to work for a company like that, with a big vision, beautiful products, ubiquitous access — it feels like a once in a lifetime. We talked earlier, but we’ve been in market here twelve years in Australia, and that’s not a long time. You could suggest, we have over a million users, so how late are we in that journey? Based on what we’re building now and the fact we’re releasing more products and solving more problems, sometimes it feels like we’re only at step one of a very long journey of possible value creation. That’s energising — to think I’m still part of the founding team. There’s so much more to do.

Dexter Cousins 17:55
As somebody who in my day job hires a lot of country manager roles for international fintechs, I’ve seen a lot of things that work and a lot that don’t. What have been the secrets to success in getting the results you have? I look at the country manager role and think it’s probably the hardest job you could have in fintech here in Oz. You’re often left isolated by yourself, across different time zones, and you feel like you’re on a 24/7 roster of meetings. What have been your secrets to success?

Karl Durrance 18:33
Those things are there. But you need to choose the mindset with which you enter the business and how you operate it. One of our operating principles is that we focus on our customers and put the customer at the centre of everything we do. When we talk about what we’re building, what we’re trying to achieve in the market — one of the coaching things I spend a lot of time on with the team is, what is the impact to the customer? Why is this important to them? Let’s work backwards from the challenge they’re trying to solve, then work out whether we can apply our technology to help that outcome.

If we continue to be the partner focused on solving our customers’ problems — not ours, not our growth projections, not moving a certain product — the rest figures itself out. It anchors us in the culture of being a user-focused company.

It also gives us a different type of energy. You can go around the office and ask, what are you focused on, what have you achieved today, what have you achieved this week? And when the answer is, I helped customer XYZ achieve this, or we’ve launched customer XYZ into another country — their answer isn’t anchored in what’s good for us, it’s anchored in what’s good for the customer. What’s good for the customer ends up being good for us too, because at the end of the day we share in that growth profile. That’s something I make sure I anchor on myself, that I coach the team on, and that steers the decisions we make.

Dexter Cousins 21:20
Karl, we get a lot of founders listening to this show. If they’re interested in finding out more about Stripe as a solution for their business, or a partnership, what’s the best way to find out more?

Karl Durrance 21:34
We’ve got a team on the ground here in Sydney and Melbourne, and a team in Auckland, New Zealand. There are opportunities to research online, but the best thing would be to reach out to the team. We’d love to understand their business and their ambition. Are they a startup looking to grow domestically? A startup trying to capture global market share? We’ve got lots of examples of how we’ve helped businesses like that, and we’d love to catch up and see if there’s a way we can help.

Dexter Cousins 22:09
We get amazing talent listening to this podcast as well. If they’re interested in careers at Stripe, where’s the best place to head?

Karl Durrance 22:17
stripe.com/jobs — you can filter by geography. We are actively hiring and plan to hire in a fairly material way next year as we continue to grow our team here, in both engineering and go-to-market roles. Bookmark that. And if there’s a particular role that interests you, you can ping the team and we can work out whether there’s a great fit.

Dexter Cousins 22:42
Karl, thanks for joining me today. It’s been awesome to have you on. What a debut — it’s mind-blowing, what a lot of building. I can’t wait to get you back on and talk about the next twelve months and some of the developments you’ve made.

Karl Durrance 23:00
I’d love to.

Dexter Cousins 23:01
Awesome. Cheers. As always, folks, you can connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter. If you’re new to the show, make sure you follow us wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you’re watching on YouTube, give us a like and a subscribe — it helps us get great guests like Karl and Stripe onto the show. Until the next episode, keep well.