Quick Overview

Slate Payments is the built-in gateway and payment processor you should consider using instead of, or in addition to, integrating Slate with external processors. You can use Slate Payments to collect an application fee or event payment, but still use another (external) payment provider for e.g. your enrollment deposit, if required.

Slate Payments typically has lower fees than any payment processor that an organization may be using, supports the greatest diversity of payment methods, provides the most robust international support, and provides the most direct integration with Slate. If you need to capture payments directly on a form/event, Slate Payments is very much the right tool to use!

Since 2016 we have processed over $1.50 billion in total payment volume. Slate Payments is powered by the Stripe Connect platform. In 2024, collectively, all the businesses running on Stripe processed $1.4 trillion in total payment volume for a calendar year (which sums to roughly 1.3% of total global GDP). Stripe is now used by half of the large Fortune 100 companies, as well as by dynamic growth companies (80% of the Forbes Cloud 100 and the Forbes AI 50 are customers).

Main benefits

1. Slate Payments allows you to embed payment capture on a form/event via the Slate payment widget (i.e. no form submission without payment!)

2. the Stripe payment element automatically displays all the accepted/available/supported payment methods for the payer’s location and device type (e.g. card brands and payment wallets that may be more popular in certain parts of the world)

3. very competitive cost ...

   1. credit card payments, a processing fee of 2.3% plus $0.30 per transaction (for US merchants across the board, incl. Amex).

   2. For a U.S. institution, transaction fees are the same for credit cards originating in any country!

   3. ACH payments (US bank accounts only), a fee of $0.25/per transaction + a fee of $1.00 per one-time payment for NACHA required ACH bank validation + verification.

4. Slate Payments allows your users to manage refunds directly inside Slate (refund initiation from the payment activity or via the payment history). Trace IDs automatically appear when and where available.

5. flexible payouts and and built-in reconciliation reporting (via the transfers/pre-filter payment history) with the option of creating custom payment-base reports (and turning those into scheduled exports to update your ERP/SIS via FTP or webservice)

6. self-service setup and easy testing mode

7. ability to easily enable/disable ACH and/or CC by payment account prompt value (i.e. any custom fee type you define in Slate)

8. Tap-to-pay feature inside the Slate mobile app, allows you to accept contactless in-person payments on your mobile device without having to use extra hardware. You can accept payments from contactless credit or debit cards, Apple Pay, Apple Watch, and smartphones with other digital wallets.

9. In-person / card present payments via bespoke Stripe hardware (with MOTO capabilities)

We actively continue to enhance the capabilities of Slate Payments (e.g. enhanced scheduled/recurring payments, payment plans beyond the Advancement-centric use cases of recurring donations).

About Stripe

Stripe’s mission is to grow the GDP of the internet. In particular, thanks to the new possibilities afforded by the internet, they believe that putting better—more global, easier to use, more flexible, faster, cheaper—economic infrastructure in the hands of companies and entrepreneurs will lead to a more vibrant and prosperous world.

In each of the last six years, Stripe has reinvested a much higher proportion of operating earnings in R&D than any comparable company. This will prove advantageous in the coming years, as stablecoins, AI, and other forces reshape the payments landscape. There is strong evidence of intense market demand for programmable financial services; the associated transformations are still in the early stages.

The corporate sector is both a cradle of invention and a densely populated graveyard of companies that had fabulous futures in their pasts. In the US, of the 500 companies in the S&P 500 at its inception in 1957, only 53 remain in the index today. More than half of that remaining 53 use Stripe.

Other long-established non-profit organizations also use Stripe:

• The University of Oxford (founded 1096) now accepts student payments online. Oxonians can pay for their books or boat club memberships with Apple Pay or Link.

• The Church of England (founded 1534) now collects donations online and can programmatically fund more than 16,000 parish churches around the UK.

• The Gaelic Athletic Association (founded 1884) has digitized 2,200 clubs with 600,000 members across Ireland and the world.

In some cases, companies are using Stripe to reinvent their business models. In others, they’re simply looking to increase their revenue from existing activities (increasing authorization rates and decreased fraud costs). These improvements are partly attributable to the scale of Stripe’s data network which is used to continually retrain dozens of machine learning models that optimize every part of the transaction flow over an economy-scale dataset. The resulting optimizations are big enough that many businesses see them in their topline revenue figures. Businesses simply start making more money when they switch to Stripe.

Another reason established companies come to Stripe is because the payments landscape continues to evolve so rapidly. Businesses need to adapt to the proliferation of new payment methods and business models, the growing sophistication of fraudulent actors, the ever more exacting expectations of consumers, and the transformation in the commerce experience instigated by AI. Stripe customers recognize that being on a legacy payments platform puts them at risk of being left behind.

Fraud mitigation

Regarding fraud - it is a bigger drag on the global economy than many might think: one report found that fraud cost 3% of a typical online business’s revenue. Fraudulent actors today operate on an industrial scale, with teams of engineers, managers, and data analysts. Stripe’s reputation network is the most effective lever to keep businesses safe. Data from $1.4 trillion in annual payments volume means that each payment makes the next payment safer. Stripe Radar develops a notion of trust for not only credit cards but email addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, shipping addresses, devices, and many more details besides. Scale matters. When a credit card is used for a payment, there is a greater than 92% chance that Stripe has encountered the same card before (and can thus compare this transaction to prior behavior). Fraudulent actors adapt their behavior as soon as they’re thwarted. Stripe enables their models to adapt in real time, so that future decisions benefit from all prior data. When a Stripe Radar fraud model makes a decision on a payment, it knows about events that occurred 100 milliseconds ago across the Stripe network. With these and other techniques, Stripe reduced card testing on their platform by over 80% in the past two years, protecting our customers from billions of fraudulent transactions.