Stripe integration for 30+ countries.

From the moment I started working at Contra, this was the thing I yearned the most to start working on. As a Fintech enthusiast, I love everything payments related, and everyone in our team was well aware of the importance for us to roll out our own payment infrastructure.

As all things software, we started by researching the major service providers in business. So, we dove deep into Stripe, Paypal, Braintree and many other payments processor's documentations to asses pros & cons for each one of them. Ultimately, we decided on working with Stripe for its very robust and complete set of features, its transparency and great reputation as a payment processor.

Our main focus along the development process was to provide an easy to use, secure and fast way to accept and manage payment for our users. We wanted something that would integrate straight into our user flow without the need of having the user hopping between multiple websites or completing tedious forms. Also, we wanted something we could deploy in the least amount of time without compromising the expected functionality we set out to achieve.

For the first iteration of payments we decided on an hybrid integration using Stripe Connect Custom accounts and Stripe Connect Onboarding. To allow as many nationalities to accept payments in Contra, we relied on Stripe's flexible and robust Connect onboarding to do the heavy lifting in the KYC aspect of things. At the same time, we used Stripe Elements and Stripe's official SDK to maintain all payment related information visible through Contra: that means transaction history, adding and removing bank accounts, etc.

Ultimately, we ended up with an implementation that not only is easy to use for our users, but it also very easy to maintain and expand as we decide to add more countries, currencies and services.