Indian and Brazilian Writers Can Soon Expect Payments Using Stripe in 2021

The US-based payments startup has been making headlines all around the world after its latest fundraiser of $600 million. The 11-year old San Francisco based fintech has now become the most valued startup in the US, with a valuation of $95 billion.

Stripe provides e-commerce payment gateway solutions to businesses and individuals across multiple countries with a major presence in Europe, where it has a presence in 35 of the 41 countries.

How important is Stripe for the writing community?

No one knows the importance of Stripe than we the writers. The two major freelance writing platforms — Medium.com and Vocal.media only support Stripe payments gateway.

As a writer who started my Medium journey 7 months back, I was lucky to find a way to register my payment account with the help of a workaround (using Payoneer credentials), and I thanks Anangsha Alammyan for her YouTube video that helped me to do it. I have shared her link with multiple Indian writers on Quora who had the same question.

But in 2021, Stripes started asking for social security numbers for new registrations and the Payoneer method became redundant. I was tense after this update as I knew that the day Stripe starts reviewing accounts and suspending them for lack of mandatory information, my income from Medium would be nil.

I had experienced the frustration of writers from these non-Stripe supported countries on multiple groups in Facebook, Quora, Slacks community for not being able to earn from these platforms even when they had the skills to make a living from writing. And I very well knew that the day Stripe asks me to update my account, I would easily be one of them.

I was also frustrated with these platforms as I thought that they were making fun of writers from these countries. It allowed us to register and write for them but never bothered to add any new supporting gateways like Paypal to its payment option. In short — These platforms were enjoying free lunches from these writers, and I don’t think that’s ethical.

A glimmer of hope from Stripe

I was wasting a lot of time on Google, searching for alternate ways to register payment account on these freelance writing websites for non-Stripe supported countries. I wanted to keep myself ready for the day my worst dreams would come true, and I see that dreaded mail from Stripe in my inbox.

While searching the internet today, 15th March, I stumbled upon an update from the Stripe newsroom, which made me dance in joy. While the Stripe CEO tweeted about it in brief, the company’s official statement in its newsroom release states this, “In 2021, Stripe will continue to build its Global Payments and Treasury Network, further expanding its suite of software and services to help ambitious businesses drive more revenue. Stripe will also soon be available to millions of more businesses in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and the UAE.”

The update unknowingly made me dance in joy. Finally, some good news for the writers from these countries who have been waiting for the beta phase to get over, for years. And believe me, the wait was longer than it seems.

Should we rejoice?

If what is mentioned becomes a reality, it would be one of the happiest day of my life. But I don’t want to be over-enthusiastic and create unnecessary expectations.

Because this is not the first time, the company is attempting an entry in India. In 2016, Stripe set up its first base in India by hiring former Amazon India executive Anand Balaji as it’s country head.

In 2017, the company kicked off an “invite-only beta program with a small group of Indian companies”. However, the company hasn’t made any significant progress in India’s payments ecosystem yet.

We should keep our fingers crossed, hoping this time it would be a different result and Stripe will succeed in launching a successful and sustainable business model in India.

Key Benefits

If Stripe successfully enables payments to these countries, as platforms like Medium and Vocal will experience a flood of new writers from these huge and populous countries like India and Brazil. This will be like a booster shot to their revenue in 2021.

For readers of these platforms, there would be a lot more new and fresh content that this new generation of writers would bring to the table. Readers will have much more choices on multiple topics, and that might help them with better answers to their problems.

For the new writers entering these writing platforms, it would be one more opportunity to monetize their skills and grow as future top writers.

The existing top writers will be the biggest gainers as these new incoming writers would want to learn about these platforms and improve their writing skills to better their income. This is like a goldmine for the established top writers who already have a large audience and run multiple courses to help upgrade ones’ writing skills, which means more views, more readers, and more income.

I know the journey is uncertain, but I am so excited by the update, or should I say over-excited. The dates are not yet announced, nor are the details of the offering (it only says merchants), but the little information was enough for me to write this entire story. It just shows you how happy I am, and I am sure after reading this, most of the writers from these countries would share the same feeling.

How bad I want this to work this time — maybe more than Stripe itself.

As the song from Shaggy goes - It's hope, that keeps you going on!!