Stripe buying Recko to improve payment accounting

Stripe is furthering its push beyond its core business of enabling online payments, agreeing to acquire Recko, a firm that sells software that tracks business' financial health.

The Bangalore, India-based Recko automates reconciliation, or comparing a firm's internal sales log to its bank statement to confirm accuracy and track cash positions.

Stripe contends this is still a largely manual process at many businesses, which leads to accounting lags and potential inaccuracies for fast-growing online businesses. The challenge is compounded by the need to track currency conversion, refunds, chargebacks, bundled bank deposits and other records for thousands of transactions in a given month.

Recko, which was founded in 2017, automates the collection of transaction data from financial systems and spreadsheet formats such as Excel and CSV. The software is designed to match transactions in a few clicks, avoiding the need to connect lump-sum deposits to a group of individual payments. The software also accounts for differences in currencies as well as fees, refunds or other adjustments that don't necessarily appear as part of financial records.

Recko's users include Deliveroo, Meesho, Pharma and other internet businesses.

The acquisition fuels Stripe's attempts to own more of its sellers' business through services such as Stripe Revenue Recognition, Stripe Billing and Stripe Invoicing.

Terms of the Recko deal were not disclosed. Stripe has also made several investments in the past year in companies that power back-office operations, such as human resources, enterprise resource planning and general data management.

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Payments M&A
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