Design a new feature in Connect that helps enterprise merchants achieve better outcomes

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Stripe is financial infrastructure for internet businesses; its products include payments, Checkout, Billing, Connect, Radar, Issuing, Terminal, and tax tools.

Stripe Connect enables platforms and marketplaces to move money between buyers, sellers, service providers, and other connected accounts. In this question, you are designing a new Connect feature for enterprise merchants—large, complex businesses that may operate globally, manage many sub-merchants or sellers, handle high payment volume, and care deeply about reliability, conversion, compliance, reporting, and operational control.

Your task is to identify a meaningful enterprise merchant problem within the Connect experience and design a feature that helps these merchants achieve better business outcomes. The focus should be on understanding the workflow friction faced by enterprise teams using Connect, such as payments operations, finance, risk, compliance, developer, and growth teams, rather than proposing a generic payments feature.

You should frame the user, their current journey, the pain points, and the business impact before defining what the new product experience needs to support. The feature should fit Stripe’s strengths in financial infrastructure, developer experience, trust, compliance, and global scale, while recognizing that enterprise customers compare Stripe against sophisticated alternatives such as Adyen, PayPal, Square, Razorpay, and Checkout.com.

The experience should consider:

- Which enterprise merchant persona or team is being served, and what “better outcomes” means for them

- The specific Connect workflow being improved, such as onboarding, payouts, payment acceptance, reconciliation, compliance, fraud operations, reporting, or global expansion

- How the feature would reduce friction, risk, manual work, failed payments, lost conversion, or operational uncertainty

- How the experience should work across dashboards, APIs, alerts, reporting, and developer workflows

- What constraints exist around compliance, money movement, privacy, fraud prevention, uptime, and global market differences

- How the feature would support both business users and technical teams inside an enterprise account

- How success could be evaluated through customer, platform, financial, and operational outcomes

- What trade-offs may arise between flexibility, simplicity, reliability, and enterprise customization

The goal is to present a clear product design approach for a high-impact Connect feature: define the customer problem, articulate why it matters for enterprise merchants and Stripe, outline the intended experience, and explain how the product would create measurable value without jumping directly to implementation details or a single predetermined solution.