Stripe announced a new partnership with Microsoft that enables North American businesses to accept payments directly in Microsoft Teams.

The Microsoft Teams collaboration platform offers video conferencing, voice, messaging, and other embedded tools to more than 300 million global businesses. Stripe will power Teams Payments, allowing meeting hosts to accept real-time card payments during virtual appointments, classes, events, and more. Businesses can now set advance payment through Stripe as a requirement to join a Teams session.

Brenna Robinson

“We’re thrilled to partner with Stripe to help unlock new revenue streams for companies on Teams Payments,”

said Brenna Robinson, general manager, SMB, at Microsoft.

“Our collaboration with Stripe allows us to better serve our customers, deepen the impact of Teams, and boost revenue growth.”

In this Teams session, participants are prompted to make a live payment in the chat.

Enabling faster online payments on Microsoft Teams

93 percent of businesses have to deal with late payments from customers, which impede cash flow and damage balance sheets. Businesses on Teams Payments and Stripe can accept payments from customers before, during, or after a virtual session, then access the funds in seconds.

Microsoft is using Stripe Connect to streamline payment acceptance and identity verification for transactions in Teams. When merchants sign up for Teams Payments, Stripe handles the onboarding requirements to help them get paid. An online yoga instructor, for example, can now request payments from students within a Teams chat. Microsoft will use Connect to programmatically route funds from customers to merchants after a payment has been made.

Mike Clayville

“Our partnership brings Stripe into one of the world’s most popular collaboration platforms and will help millions of companies accelerate their online revenue growth,”

said Mike Clayville, chief revenue officer at Stripe.

“With Stripe, more businesses can now accept payments as easily as launching a video conference, chat, or virtual presentation within Microsoft Teams.”

Teams Payments is available in preview in the Teams App store and to customers with a Microsoft 365 or Teams subscription in the US and Canada.

This article first appeared on fintechnews.am