Funding Issuing balances with Connect
Before an issued card can be used for transactions, you must first allocate funds to the connected account’s Issuing balance associated with the card. An Issuing balance holds funds reserved for the card and is safely separated from earnings, payouts, and funds from other Stripe products.
Fund from a bank account
You have two options for funding an Issuing balance from an external account that each have different setups: pull funding and push funding.
- Pull funding is the default funding option in the US and isn’t available in the EU or the UK. You need to verify external bank accounts, which usually causes a delay in transferring funds (up to 5 business days). This option allows you to control and identify which bank your top-up originates from.
- Push funding is available in the UK and EU and as a beta in the US. This options allows you to originate the funds from your own bank account to Stripe. You might be able to receive funds the same day with push funding, which depends on the process you use (for example, ACH or wire transfer).
Fund from a connected account's Stripe balanceBeta
You must sign up for the Balance Transfer API private beta to transfer funds from your Stripe balance into your Issuing balance.
Transfers from your connected account’s Stripe balance are instant and available 24x7 in the US, or take one business day in the UK and euro area countries. This allows you to quickly and easily utilize earned funds from Stripe Payments for spend with Stripe Issuing.
You can only move an amount up to the available Stripe balance. Funds won’t be available in the Issuing balance while the transfer is pending.
Use the retrieve balance endpoint to get your available Stripe balance amounts broken down by source_type
.
Request early access
Access to the Balance Transfer API is currently limited to beta users. You must be an Issuing customer to join the beta. To request access to the beta, log in to your Stripe account and refresh the page. Contact Stripe for more information.
Fund from your platform Issuing balanceBeta
You can transfer funds from your platform Issuing balance to the Issuing balance on each of your connected accounts. A transfer moves the funds from the platform’s Issuing balance to the connected account’s Issuing balance, reducing the platform’s Issuing balance.
Funds from these transfers are instantly available and help you better manage your connected accounts since you don’t need to individually top up each connected account from an external source.
You can only transfer funds up to the amount you have in your platform Issuing balance, which you can look up using the retrieve balance endpoint. Attempting to transfer more funds than is available triggers an error.
You must sign up for the Connect Transfer API private beta to transfer funds from your platform to your connected accounts.
Reversing transfers
You can reverse transfers made to connected accounts if, for example, you made an error in the original transfer, or if there is a refund and you want to pull funds back to the platform. Use the amount
parameter to specify how much of the transfer to reverse.
Reverse transfers add the specified amount back to the platform’s Issuing balance, which reduces the connected account’s Issuing balance. A reverse transfer happens immediately and funds returned to the platform’s Issuing balance are instantly available. You can only reverse a transfer for up to the amount of funds in the connected account’s Issuing balance.
Request early access
Access to the Connect Transfers API is currently limited to beta users. You must be an Issuing customer to join the beta. To request access to the beta, log in to your Stripe account and refresh the page. Contact Stripe for more information.
Retrieve an Issuing balance
To check the current Issuing balance of a connected account, call the Balance API GET endpoint and pass the connected account ID into the header.
Thebalance
object is returned with a corresponding issuing
object that includes the current available balance:
{ "object": "balance", ... "issuing": { "available": [ { "amount": 100, "currency": "usd" } ] }, "livemode": false }
Pay out an Issuing balance to an external account
The funds in an Issuing balance can also be paid out to a connected account’s external bank account using the Payouts API POST endpoint and specifying the source_balance
of the payout as issuing.