Stripe has a real-time inflation indicator from its payments data — Patrick Collison says they should have published it

Summary

Stripe has built an internal real-time inflation indicator from its payments data that could be more reliable than the Consumer Price Index, according to co-founder Patrick Collison in an interview on the All In podcast.

Collison said the Stripe team constructed a leading indicator by tracking price changes across its ecommerce platform. Because Stripe processes transactions at scale across online merchants, upward price movement signals potential inflation ahead. When asked by Chamath Palihapitiya whether Stripe had considered publishing the data, Collison said the company should have done so. "I feel a bit rueful with you asking the question because I feel like on some level, we should have done it," he said.

The data has real limitations. Stripe's transaction base skews toward online purchases and innovative companies, missing categories that drive consumer inflation like gasoline and groceries. Stripe's own growth and business evolution also make historical comparisons less representative of the broader economy. Still, Collison argued that the government and markets would benefit from the release. "I think it's a public good for there to be better and more reliable economic data," he said.

The appeal is obvious: the official CPI undergoes large backward revisions, making it difficult for people transacting in markets to act decisively. A real-time alternative derived from actual merchant pricing rather than lagged government surveys could fill that gap. Stripe isn't the only payments company sitting on this data — Ramp, the corporate card and expense platform, has posted similar signals about AI spending trends through its own customer base. But Collison's suggestion that Stripe should publish signals the broader opportunity to turn payment flow data into public infrastructure for economic measurement.