Identity Verification for Custom Accounts

Identity verification of Stripe accounts you manage is an important—and required—step toward reducing risk on your platform when using Connect.

Every country has its own laws when it comes to paying out funds to individuals and companies. These are typically known as “Know Your Customer” (KYC) regulations. Regardless of the country, the broad requirements are:

Collecting information about the individual or company receiving funds
Verifying the information is accurate

To support the widest range of platforms and user experiences, Connect lets Custom accounts collect the required information from your users and provide it to Stripe. This may include personal information and a scan of a government-issued ID. We’ll then attempt verification, asking for more information when needed.

The rest of this page goes through the verification flow options, how our API fields translate to both companies and individuals, and how to localize information requests. You should also read our Handling Identity Verification with the API guide to learn how to programmatically provide information and handle requests.

Verification flow and requirements

Connect platforms need to collect the required information from Custom account owners and provide it to Stripe for verification. It’s up to the platform to decide exactly when and how to ask for information from its users while still meeting our requirements.

The minimum information needed to send payouts must be provided to Stripe by the platform within seven days of the first charge created for that account or after processing a couple of thousand U.S. dollars (or equivalent) in charges—whichever comes first. This information includes:

The entity type (individual or company)
The business name (company only)
Full legal name of the individual or company representative
Date of birth of the individual or company representative

If this isn’t completed, Stripe temporarily pauses charge creation until this information is provided. After 21 calendar days from the first charge, if this information still isn’t provided, charges on the account are automatically refunded. Charges are refunded incrementally, not in a lump sum. For example, if the first charge is made on May 1st, and the last charge is made on May 6th, the first charge is refunded on May 22nd, and the last charge is refunded on May 27th.

Once the Custom account has received payouts totaling more than a couple of thousand U.S. dollars (or equivalent), we’ll ask for any additional verification information that is still required. If Stripe cannot verify the account with the information provided after paying out another few thousand U.S. dollars (or equivalent), payouts for that Custom account are temporarily paused until identity verification is complete.

With this process in mind, platforms should decide whether to provide the bare minimum of information or the full user details up front.

	Provide bare minimum	Provide full details
Pros	Fastest way to start Higher onboarding rate	A single request for information (normally) Fewer problems in receiving payouts Weeds out potential fraudsters
Cons	Need to request and provide information later Users may be bothered by repeated requests More likely to see delays in receiving payouts	Some legitimate users may turn away If not done properly at first, you'll still need to ask for more information later

Individual vs. company information

The specific KYC information required depends upon the type of entity involved. For individuals, it’s straightforward: collect and provide information about that person.

For companies, collect information about the company. You’ll also need to collect information about one or more company representatives. A company representative can be anyone who has authorization to set up a Custom account on the company’s behalf. You might subsequently need to provide additional information about the company’s additional owners, if applicable.

The API uses the same terminology regardless of entity type, so you may need to customize how you prompt your users for more for information. Consider these examples (this is not an exhaustive list):

	Individual	Company
`legal_entity.address.*`	Individual's address	Business's address
`legal_entity.first_name`, `legal_entity.dob.`, `legal_entity.personal_address.`	Individual's information	Company representative's information
`legal_entity.personal_id_number`	Individual's personal ID number	Company representative's personal ID number
`legal_entity.verification.document`	Individual's ID	Company representative's ID

Internationalization and localization

If you support users in multiple countries, you’ll need to consider internationalization and localization when asking for information. Creating an interface that uses not only the user’s preferred language but also the proper localized terminology results in a smoother onboarding experience.

For example, instead of always displaying Business Tax ID to your users, regardless of country, you should present:

EIN, U.S.
Business Number, Canada
Company Number, UK

You can find recommended country-specific labels along with the other required verification information.

United States