Payments processing firm Stripe Inc. is getting into the infrastructure business today with the launch of a new product called Data Pipeline that customers can use to synchronize their transaction data with information stored in Amazon Redshift and Snowflake data warehouses.

Stripe explained that many of its customers have massive information stores spread across the cloud, containing data from customer support tools, customer relationship management applications, marketing and more. However, it said, it’s difficult for those customers to combine this information with their transaction data to analyze it and glean insights.

The company aims to change that by helping customers consolidate all of their payments and financial data in the cloud, so they can derive insights from it more easily.

Stripe Data Pipeline gives customers an easy way to move their transaction data to those cloud data stores. It removes the need to build a complex application programming interface, which can cost thousands of dollars and requires extensive expertise.

In an interview with VentureBeat, Stripe Product Lead Vladi Shuntorov explained that building API integrations from scratch can take months. They require ongoing maintenance too, with engineers having to constantly monitor such APIs to support transaction updates, new datasets and schema changes, he said.

Companies can alternatively use a data integration platform such as Fivetran, Matillion or Airbyte. Those platforms provide pre-built connectors that can transfer data from Stripe to Redshift and Snowflake.

But Shunturov said these solutions are not ideal because they don’t support the full range of Stripe data, leading to “incomplete results” when trying to analyze it. The problem is that those extract, transact and load tools can access data only from Stripe’s core REST API, Shunturov said. On the other hand, Data Pipeline can also pull “business-ready metrics” from the company’s reporting API, such as information relating to balance changes after each financial transaction.

According to Shunturov, accessing Stripe’s reporting API “significantly reduces the amount of work” that’s required to transform transaction data into meaningful reports and insights.

The data Stripe provides can be of use to multiple teams within an organization. For instance, a security and fraud team at a fast food chain could combine transaction data with other business information to identify which of their outlets are most at risk of being scammed. Someone else could use the data to discover new growth opportunities for their business by tracking the flow of payments across a customer’s lifecycle and working out a way to cut costs or extract more money from them.

Stripe said Data Pipeline has been up and running for a while in closed beta tests with customers including Zoom Video Communications Inc., HubSpot Inc. and Neutron Holdings Inc., the parent company of e-scooter rental firm Lime. The platform is now generally available for all Stripe customers in the U.S. In the future, the offering could also work with additional data warehouses, such as Google Cloud’s BigQuery or Databricks Inc., though Stripe didn’t confirm any plans to do so.

“We’re always considering ways to expand our services and better serve our users, but don’t have any specific plans to share at this time,” Shunturov told TechCrunch.

Image: Stripe