Embedded Finance Review Podcast, episode 48. Published 11 June 2026. Guest: Julius Danek, Stripe. Host: Lars Markull.
Lars Markull: There is a quiet but important distinction inside payments that most platforms in Germany and beyond are getting wrong, according to my guest today. Julius Danek leads product for Stripe in DACH and CEE, and his argument is that many platforms are still defaulting to a grey label setup, where their own merchants still see and interact with a PSP directly, when they should be going full white label the way Shopify and Toast did many years ago.
We get into why that matters, especially in the age of AI and vibe coded software, and what platforms are leaving on the table by playing it safe. Beyond that, we talk about what platforms actually receive from Stripe Connect on day one, when it makes sense to layer capital and issuing on top of payments, and why he thinks German companies in particular should run far fewer RFPs and just start experimenting with these products instead.
My name is Lars Markull and I'm the founder of Embedded Finance Review. Embedded Finance Review is a newsletter, podcast and event series covering the European embedded finance ecosystem. And if you're working on an embedded finance project and want a free intro call to get feedback and meet the right providers and partners in the space, head to embeddedfinancereview.com and request a slot. And now let's dive in.
Welcome
Lars Markull: Hi Julius, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today, and in what part of the world are you located right now?
Julius Danek: Hi Lars, thank you so much for having me. I'm currently back in Berlin, my home base.
Leading product for a region
Lars Markull: That's great to hear. Julius, obviously Stripe is a very common name in the fintech world, and obviously also in the embedded finance world. We want to dive into that, understand better the products that Stripe is offering. As I've been seeing in the space, there's obviously a lot of interest, a lot of different features, but the companies that I talk to on a daily basis are non-financial brands, very often also quite far from the fintech world that I think both of us and a lot of other people are very deep into.
But before we go to that, I would love to hear, you obviously are responsible for Stripe product in the DACH region, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and also CEE, Central and Eastern Europe. Obviously Stripe has many product colleagues in Europe and obviously in the US, so it would be good to understand, what is your role specifically about? What does it mean when you lead payments for an international fintech giant like Stripe in this specific region?
Julius Danek: Yes, of course. I think at Stripe we have at this point over three hundred product managers and I think several thousand engineers that all work on R&D. Most of these are located throughout the world, with a majority in the United States. We have product and engineering teams that are specifically responsible for certain regions, and my core role is ensuring that the Stripe product suite is adapted to the needs of the specific region.
That is a lot easier if you're a company like Google or Facebook, where the product is pretty homogenous and it's the same across the world. In financial technology, licensing, expectations, especially around payments, differ vastly from region to region. And so it's really important to take a region-specific lens and apply that throughout the globe. And so specifically in Europe, we have a couple of folks here that make sure that our product works well for our European users.
Lars Markull: And are there some specific examples, or maybe you can tell us a little bit how your day looks? Because when I hear about a person like you responsible for Stripe product in Germany, I would think, okay, those are the typical local payment methods, that's basically the most important thing. But maybe you can walk us through in a little more detail. What does it really mean to localise a Stripe product in Germany?
Julius Danek: Yeah, so I'd say there's a couple of different facets to it. A lot of it is around payment methods of course. So a big project that I did when I started was making sure that girocard worked on Stripe Terminals in Germany. That was a very long project which needed certification, knowledge of the German market, how important this is to German users, which is not always clear to our product teams in the United States that don't talk to these users every day.
Which also brings me to the second role that I have here, which is I engage with a lot of our users in Germany on the ground. I visit them in their offices, I listen to them talk, understand what their concerns are, where the Stripe product maybe falls short, and then either tackle that with my team or bring those insights to the Stripe product teams that are situated throughout the world. And I would say that's a very valuable task of having product teams on the ground, because it matters, having the voice of the user in the room.
And Stripe specifically is a pretty complicated product, because if you look on our website we have like 50 or so different product suites. We're really a financial technology platform. And so in my role I need to have a rudimentary understanding of every single product, and then I have an expert understanding of the products that I'm working on myself, such as girocard on Terminal, or various local payment methods like Wero, or Stripe Capital in Germany.
Lars Markull: So one part of your role is that you are becoming the, maybe not German ambassador, but the person who understands the German market from a product perspective really well. And then it's about, in a way, convincing your US colleagues, or wherever the team is located, that this is a relevant, important thing for the success of Stripe in, for example, the German market.
Julius Danek: Absolutely. And the German market does carry heft, as do the other European markets like France, Spain, Italy or even the UK. And the beauty is that most of the needs that we have in the German market aren't really Germany specific when it comes to Stripe, many of them stretch pan-European. And so often I'll work with my French colleague for example, to join forces in order to get something across the line that's important for Europe. But we also have our own product and engineering teams we can build things with. So it's a balance of, hey, what are the most important things, those we can tackle ourselves, and then what are the ones that are pretty important but where we work with teams across the world.
What Stripe Connect actually is
Lars Markull: Makes sense. As mentioned, obviously this is the Embedded Finance Review podcast, so let's dive a little bit into the world of embedded finance. Obviously Stripe's history is very much driven by the success of online payments, and you have a lot of customers who use Stripe to accept payments in their own e-commerce shops.
When we talk to the non-financial brands, the vertical software as a service companies or digital platforms, these kinds of companies obviously want to go one level further, or one level deeper, accepting for example the payments for their own customers as a platform. And I think that's where the Stripe Connect part comes in. This is a product that of course is really well known in the ecosystem, but maybe you can walk us into a little more detail. What does it really mean, Stripe Connect, and what does it entail for the platform?
Julius Danek: Yeah, so maybe well known in the specifics of the ecosystem, but I'll be totally honest that when I joined Stripe, my background is predominantly in data and software product, so I didn't really work in fintech before, and I didn't understand the importance of Stripe Connect and the role that platforms play for a company like Stripe.
If you roughly divide Stripe's business into two verticals, we have a direct business, so you, Lars, can now sign up on the stripe.com webpage for your own account and you can start accepting payments tomorrow. And I actually used that as a user for my previous company. But the other part of Stripe's business, and which I think is the larger part of it actually, is making the ability to accept payments, the ability to offer financial services, making that available to other platforms, so white labelling our services.
And the most prominent example of that is Shopify Payments. So Shop Pay is completely powered by Stripe, which they white label. So even though it says Shop Pay, under the hood every payment is processed through Stripe and through our APIs. And that's really the power of what is called embedded payments, embedding payments functionality into your product even though you yourself are not a payments processor.
And if you want to put some numbers to this, on Stripe Connect we have more than sixteen thousand platforms and over eleven million businesses that are connected to those platforms. So it shows you the scale. It's absolutely massive.
Lars Markull: And from a product perspective, as a fintech outsider you might say, okay, this is accepting payments. What's the difference between accepting payments on my e-commerce shop versus accepting payments on this platform on behalf of somebody else? Maybe you can go into a little more detail on what is really the difference from a product perspective, and how does it matter for the platform?
Julius Danek: So it's pretty easy. If you're Lars and you open your own web shop, any time somebody buys a product off you, they know that they're buying it off you, and you're likely going to appear as the merchant of record. You have your integration with Stripe, you offer the payments through our checkout et cetera. So that's pretty straightforward.
However, if you start using something like Shopify Payments, or if you're a service provider on another SaaS platform, and I think a famous example of this is always Uber, the ride-sharing services, all of a sudden it doesn't become as straightforward. Because when you accept a payment as a platform, you typically have to split it out into the various participants on your platform.
So for example, Uber has to pay out their drivers. They also have to pay out restaurants in the case of Uber Eats. If it's Shopify, Shopify has to make sure that when you create a Shopify store, larsmarkull.com, instead of doing it through Stripe directly, if you do it through Shopify, Shopify needs to make sure that the money gets routed to you from the customers.
And so that requires pretty sophisticated infrastructure, and is also a very regulated space. PSD2 in Europe for example, you as a platform are not allowed to touch the customer money that flows through your systems. Now that's pretty important, because why? You don't want to intermingle the money that belongs to your customers with your own operating funds for example. That can lead to some severe shenanigans.
And so going back to the example of Uber, Uber accepts a payment, Uber appears as the merchant of record on the card statement. But behind the scenes Uber takes their one, two, five percent cut, and then the rest goes to the driver. But Uber doesn't ever touch that money, the ninety-five percent that goes to the driver. That gets routed through Stripe's systems, because we have the right licences in place to be able to touch that money and to cleanly segregate and separate it.
Lars Markull: Interesting. And you touched on a couple of the numbers for Stripe Connect and the relevance. Obviously you've not been part of Stripe since the beginning, but I would assume when Stripe was founded the focus was really on the direct merchants. From your perspective, maybe also from that slightly outsider perspective, has there been a point in time when the relevance shifted a little bit, and it's now, as you said, the Stripe Connect platform is such a different beast than it was maybe at first?
Julius Danek: So I think the early iterations of Stripe Connect came pretty soon after the launch for direct users. And the way that Stripe thinks about developing these products is that you develop them hand in hand with key customers, and the key customer in this case was Shopify. So Shopify and us basically jointly developed the Stripe Connect product, and it turns out there are a lot of different use cases that you can use Stripe Connect for. And so it was basically using this pilot customer and working with them to scale a massive, massive product at this point.
It kind of goes back to how Stripe operates in many ways with our users. The whole motto of Stripe is users first, and so that is really that motto in action, as you're growing with this customer over time. I think at this point, over 10 years of partnership.
Grey label versus white label
Lars Markull: Of course. And as we said, Stripe Connect, this embedded payments solution, is often the first touchpoint for platforms to enter the world of embedded finance and financial services. You mentioned a couple of times Shopify is a great example that very often the companies don't stop there. Maybe it takes a couple of months or years to make it really a success. But then sooner or later we are hearing or seeing issuing, meaning card issuing solutions, that platforms integrate, and of course also financing products like capital. We're talking here about a platform that provides cards for the customers but also provides a financing solution as part of the overall offering.
Arguably I would say the pitch for a company, if you're just looking at embedding payments, is so important because obviously this is a very crucial one. Issuing and capital are relevant as well, but feel like they are a step harder for the platform to adopt, and also maybe for their own customers. What's your view on that, focusing on the capital and issuing product?
Julius Danek: Well, taking a step back, what you see is that in Europe we're much slower in adopting any type of embedded functionality. Even if you're looking at Stripe Connect, there are basically two flavours. Flavour one is you basically allow customers on your webpage to sign up for a Stripe account that then gets connected to whatever your platform is, like let's say Magento or Adobe Commerce. But the customers, the merchants, they still log into a Stripe account. They still have a relationship with us, but you get revenue shares on the back end et cetera.