Stripe Launches Multi-Currency Support in Canada to Facilitate Global Reach

Stripe today launched multi-currency support in Canada, which means internet businesses can accept payments in more than 100 currencies from customers anywhere.

Using Stripe, Canadian businesses can display prices in whatever local currency their customers prefer while still receiving final payment in CAD or USD. To do this previously would have been “prohibitively complex” for most Canadian startups,  according to Stripe, as it required working with multiple providers and merchant processors for each currency.

Forrester reported last year that online retailers in Canada reported “only an average of 3% of their sales come from outside Canada, indicating that they are largely missing out on approximately $150 billion of [global] online cross-border sales—a number set to triple by 2021.”

Now, with one integration, a Canadian website with a global customer base can charge Europeans in euros, Japanese customers in yen, Mexican customers in pesos, and so on. This helps Canadian businesses reach international audiences, Stripe says, and can also have a material impact on their existing business by reducing international card decline rates by up to 20%.

“Canada is quietly becoming a hotbed for entrepreneurship, but it’s been too difficult for Canadian startups to sell globally,” said Lachy Groom, Stripe’s Head of Card Payments. “We’re excited to help businesses in Canada take full advantage of the global internet economy.”

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