Using Connect with Express accounts
With Express accounts, you can quickly onboard users so they can be paid immediately. You can customize the branding of the Express onboarding flow and dashboard. Stripe hosts the dashboard—you can grant access through your platform so your users can access it.
Connect Onboarding is the recommended method for creating Express accounts. However, you can also use OAuth with Express accounts.
Get started
If you’re new to Connect, start with one of our guides to use Express accounts with your application:
- Collect payments and then pay out, if you’ll process payments with Stripe
- Pay out money, if you’ll add money from a bank account to pay out
Express demo
To see the complete Express onboarding flow in action, try the sample end-to-end Express integration before you start building your own. This demo includes an example of a user onboarding experience and account management for Rocket Rides, an on-demand marketplace.
You can find the demo’s complete source code on GitHub.
Prerequisites for using Express
To create Express accounts, you must meet all of these requirements:
- Minimum API version: Express requires the API version 2017-05-25 or later. Capabilities in Express require the API version 2019-02-19 or later.
- Platform in a supported country: Platforms in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States can create Express accounts for any country Stripe supports.
- Vetting for fraud: Your platform is ultimately responsible for losses incurred by Express accounts. To best protect against this, you need to closely examine all accounts that sign up using your platform for potential fraud. Refer to our best practices guide for more information.
- Platform profile: You need to complete your platform’s profile.
Onboarding Express Accounts outside of your platform’s country
You can enable onboarding on a per-country basis in the Connect Settings section of your dashboard.
The Express account onboarding flow is currently localized in English, French, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, and Swedish.
Keep the following in mind when onboarding accounts globally:
- International business: Your platform is responsible for understanding the implications of doing business internationally, such as tax and financial reporting.
- Charge flows: Be sure to review your options for creating charges based on the countries you intend to operate in.
- Service agreement type: Your platform can create connected accounts under the recipient service agreement to enable cross-border transfers. Such accounts have restricted access to capabilities.
How to use Connect Onboarding for Express accounts
- Go to your Connect settings page to customize the visual appearance of the form with your brand’s name, color, and icon. Connect Onboarding requires this information.
- Use the
/v1/accountsAPI to create a new account and get the account ID. You can prefill information on the account object for the user before you generate the account link. You must pass the following parameter:type=express
- Call the Account Links API with the following parameters. For more parameters, see the API ref.
accountrefresh_urlreturn_urltype=account_onboarding
- In the onboarding flow for your own platform, redirect your user to the
urlreturned by Account Links. - Handle additional account states, redirecting your user to the Connect Onboarding flow if necessary.
Create an Express account and prefill information
Use the /v1/accounts API to create an Express account and set type to express in the account creation request.
If you know the country and capabilities for your connected account, you can provide that information when you create the account. Connect Onboarding then collects the requirements for those capabilities.
If you omit capabilities, Connect Onboarding uses the settings in the Configuration settings section of the Stripe Dashboard to automatically request capabilities based on the country for the connected account.
If you’ve already collected information for your connected accounts, you can prefill that information on the account object for the user and it won’t be collected again in the Connect Onboarding flow. Connect Onboarding only collects required information when you create or update an account.
Create an account link
You can create an account link by calling the Account Links API with the following parameters:
accountrefresh_urlreturn_urltype=account_onboarding
Redirect your user to the account link URL
The response to your Account Links request includes a value for the key url. Redirect to this link to send your user into the flow. URLs from the Account Links API are temporary and can only be used once because they grant access to the account holder’s personal information. Authenticate the user in your application before redirecting them to this URL. If you want to prefill information, you must do so before generating the account link. After you create the account link for an Express account, you won’t be able to read or write information for the account.
Don’t email, text, or otherwise send account link URLs directly to your user. Instead, redirect the authenticated user to the account link URL from within your platform’s application.
Handle the user returning to your platform
Connect Onboarding requires you to pass both a return_url and refresh_url to handle all cases where the user will be redirected to your platform. It’s important that you implement these correctly to provide the best experience for your user.
You can use HTTP for your return_url and refresh_url while in test mode (e.g., to test with localhost), but in live mode only HTTPS is accepted. Be sure to swap testing URLs for HTTPS URLs before going live.
return_url
Stripe issues a redirect to this URL when the user completes the Connect Onboarding flow. This doesn’t mean that all information has been collected or that there are no outstanding requirements on the account. This only means the flow was entered and exited properly.
No state is passed through this URL. After a user is redirected to your return_url, check the state of the details_submitted parameter on their account by doing either of the following:
- Listening to
account.updatedwebhooks. - Calling the Accounts API and inspecting the returned object.
refresh_url
Your user will be redirected to the refresh_url in these cases:
- The link is expired (a few minutes went by since the link was created).
- The link was already visited (the user refreshed the page or clicked back or forward in the browser).
- Your platform can no longer access the account.
- The account has been rejected.
Your refresh_url should trigger a method on your server to call Account Links again with the same parameters, and redirect the user to the Connect Onboarding flow to create a seamless experience.
Handle users that have not completed onboarding
A user that’s redirected to your return_url might not have completed the onboarding process. Use the /v1/accounts endpoint to retrieve the user’s account and check for charges_enabled. If the account isn’t fully onboarded, provide UI prompts to allow the user to continue onboarding later. The user can complete their account activation through a new account link (generated by your integration). You can check the state of the details_submitted parameter on their account to see if they’ve completed the onboarding process.