Irish-founded fintech Stripe is to enter into a 30-day consultation period with Irish staff as part of a process to implement job cuts.
The company is to cut 14 per cent of its staff worldwide as the global downturn continues to hit the tech sector.
The group employs between 500 and 600 staff in Dublin but has not provided a breakdown on the redundancies for specific offices or regions, so it is not yet clear how many of the dual Irish-US headquartered company’s Irish workforce will be affected.
If the 14 per cent cut was applied here between 70 and 80 Stripe employees would be in line to lose their jobs.
Collective redundancy consultation processes in Ireland require Stripe to consult with elected employee representatives with a goal of mitigating any consequences, a process that will take at least 30 days to conclude.
Stripe chief executive Patrick Collison told staff in a memo on Thursday that the cuts would not be applied evenly across the organisation. “We are not applying these headcount changes evenly across the organisation,” he said. “For example, our recruiting organisation will be disproportionately affected since we’ll hire fewer people next year.”
Mr Collison said that although the business was well positioned to weather harsh conditions, Stripe had over-hired for the current economic situation. “We, the founders, made this decision. We over-hired for the world we’re in, and it pains us to be unable to deliver the experience that we hoped that those impacted would have at Stripe.”
The cuts will return the company’s staffing level to February 2022 levels, he added.
The company said it would pay staff at least 14 weeks of severance pay, the 2022 annual bonus for all departing employees, and waive vesting cliffs.
“We were much too optimistic about the internet economy’s near-term growth in 2022 and 2023, and underestimated both the likelihood and impact of a broader slowdown,” Mr Collison said. In addition to the job cuts, “we are firmly reining in all other sources of cost”.
Stripe follows a number of other technology firms that have cut costs in recent weeks amid the general slowdown in the world economy.
