Financial Connections common use cases

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You must verify a user’s account to accept an ACH Direct Debit payment or transfer. With Financial Connections, your customer authenticates their bank account and provides permission to share the details you need to charge their account, such as a tokenized account and routing number.

Collecting bank account details from a customer with Financial Connections can help you:

• Improve payment reliability by ensuring that a user’s bank account is open and able to accept ACH direct debits.
• Increase checkout conversion by eliminating the need for your customers to leave your website or application to locate their account and routing numbers.
• Save development time by eliminating the need for you to build bank account form validation when your customer enters account details.

Optionally, you can request permission from customer to retrieve additional data on their Financial Connections account. Consider accessing balances data and ownership information to optimize your payment integration.

Retrieving additional data on an account helps you in the following ways:

• Avoid fees from insufficient funds failures and protect your customer from overdraft charges by checking an account’s balances before initiating a payment.
• Reduce fraud by matching the account owner’s name and address to the information provided by your customer at checkout.

To verify a bank account to accept an ACH Direct Debit payment with Financial Connections, you must also use the Stripe Payment Intents API or Setup Intents API or a hosted Stripe payments interface such as Checkout or the Universal Payment Element.

Learn how to collect a bank account to accept an ACH Direct Debit payment.

Micro-deposit verification is also possible as an optional fallback method of verifying an account for this use case. The following shows how the micro-deposit flow looks:

With Financial Connections, Connect platforms can verify the bank account of a Custom connected account to facilitate payouts. Your connected account can authenticate their bank account and provide permission to share details you need to send money to their bank account, such as a tokenized account and routing number, which can be passed to the External Accounts API.

Collecting account details from your connected account with Financial Connections can help you:

• Increase onboarding conversion by eliminating the need for your connected account to leave your website or application to locate their account and routing numbers.
• Reduce first payout failure rates by eliminating errors that result from manual entry of account and routing numbers.
• Ensure you don’t need to store sensitive data such as account and routing numbers on your server.
• Save development time by eliminating the need for you to build bank account form validation when your connected account enters their bank account details.

Optionally, you can request permission from your connected account to retrieve additional data on their Financial Connections account. Consider accessing balances and ownership details to optimize your onboarding and platform experience. Retrieving additional data on an account helps you in the following ways:

• Mitigate fraud when onboarding your connected account by verifying an account’s ownership details, such as the name and address of the accountholder.
• Underwrite your connected account for financial services that you might offer on your platform with balances and transactions data.

Learn how to collect a bank account to initiate payouts to a US Custom Connect account.

Manual entry of account and routing numbers is available in the authentication flow by default for this use case as both a secondary option for adding an external account and a fallback option if your connected account is unable to find their account or authenticate their account. The following shows how the manual entry flow looks:

Financial Connections lets your user link their external financial accounts to your business to securely share their financial data.

After your user has consented to share their data with you, retrieve data for various use cases, such as:

• Help your user track expenses, handle bills, manage their finances and take control of their financial well-being with transactions data.
• Speed up underwriting and improve access to credit and other financial services with transactions and balances data.

Learn how to collect an account to access data.

Manual entry of account and routing number and micro-deposit verification aren’t available in the authentication flow for this use case, as the primary goal of collecting an account is data accessibility.

You can optionally convert any Financial Connections account you’ve previously collected to a Payment Method.

Let us know how you would like to use Financial Connections by emailing the product team at stripe-financial-connections@stripe.com.