Fwiw I think a key difference in stripe vs twilio in your example is that stripe has 2 levers that twilio doesn't have good analogs to:
- stripe can be a "financial home" for many of its customers and build higher-margin pockets of software functionality, using easy payments as an on-ramp. See: stripe billing, radar, sigma, connect, etc.
- stripe is more likely to be able to "swap out" the credit card rails than twilio would be able to "swap out" sms. If the financial ecosystem evolves to make eg debit cards or any other kind of payment easier, stripe can simply add them as payment methods, as they already do for non-CC payment types (most notable outside of the US). So stripe is already at the abstraction level of "move money from customer to me" instead of "run their CC".
I think those are good points and valid, but Twilio definitly had equivalent arguments in their own product.
Encumbents manage scale very very well and historically they tend to come to a market late. While Stripe is rushing up the value chain, the issuers are just slowly lumbering around.
Billing, Radar, Sigma, Connect are all very well built products which drive usage of their core revenue generator. I suspect the revenue mix at Stripe is still largely payment processing. Voice minutes and SMSs on a carriers network, or authorizations and settlements on an issuer network.
I am not saying Stripe is doomed, far from it, but it's a non trival problem to solve over the long term and the default state is attrition. I think Twilio is a very good example of how difficult this can be.
- stripe can be a "financial home" for many of its customers and build higher-margin pockets of software functionality, using easy payments as an on-ramp. See: stripe billing, radar, sigma, connect, etc.
- stripe is more likely to be able to "swap out" the credit card rails than twilio would be able to "swap out" sms. If the financial ecosystem evolves to make eg debit cards or any other kind of payment easier, stripe can simply add them as payment methods, as they already do for non-CC payment types (most notable outside of the US). So stripe is already at the abstraction level of "move money from customer to me" instead of "run their CC".