# Stripe Brand Voice

> Authoritative, architectural, and highly functional.

## Positioning
Stripe is the financial infrastructure for the internet, providing a reliable and extensible platform for businesses of all sizes (from startups to the Fortune 100) to manage payments, billing, and global commerce.

## Voice principles
*   **Architectural:** Uses structural language like "backbone," "infrastructure," and "foundation" to convey permanence and scale.
*   **Action-Oriented:** Leads with strong verbs (Accept, Monetize, Create, Embed) to emphasize utility and capability.
*   **Precise:** Employs technical and financial accuracy without unnecessary jargon, focusing on specific outcomes like "usage-based billing" or "borderless money movement."
*   **Confident:** States facts and capabilities plainly without hyperbole, relying on scale metrics and partner names to establish trust.

## Tone by context
| Context | Tone |
|---|---|
| Marketing Hero | Ambitious and foundational. Focuses on growth and global scale. |
| Enterprise/Solutions | Agile and transformative. Emphasizes reliability and unification of complex systems. |
| Developer/Product | Functional and extensible. Focuses on integration paths, documentation, and performance. |
| Startup | Supportive and accelerated. Focuses on speed to market and future-proofing. |

## Lexicon
- **Use:** Infrastructure, backbone, orchestrate, extensible, borderless, monetize, agile, unified, comprehensive, scale with confidence.
- **Avoid:** Not evident from captured copy (though the brand avoids "easy," "simple," or "cheap" in favor of "flexible," "reliable," and "optimized").

## Messaging do's and don'ts
*   **Do:** Frame Stripe as a partner for growth and a foundational layer for business operations.
*   **Do:** Use specific business models (SaaS, agentic commerce, platforms) to show versatility.
*   **Do:** Highlight high-performance metrics (API requests per second, uptime) to prove reliability.
*   **Don't:** Use flowery or purely emotional language; keep the focus on financial and technical utility.
*   **Don't:** Refer to payments as a standalone feature; position them as part of a "financial operating system."

## Evidence
- "The backbone of global commerce"
- "Financial infrastructure to grow your revenue"
- "Reliable, extensible infrastructure for every stack"
- "Scale with confidence"
- "Transform your enterprise with agile financial infrastructure"
- "Orchestrate payments across multiple providers"