Bank transfer payments

Bank transfers provide a safe way for customers to send money over bank rails. When accepting bank transfers with Stripe, you provide customers with a virtual bank account number that they can push money to from their own online bank interface or in-person bank branch. Stripe uses this virtual account number to automate reconciliation and prevent exposing your real account details to customers.

Get started

To begin accepting bank transfers:

• Accept a bank transfer payment
• Send an invoice with bank transfer instructions
• Set up a subscription with bank transfers as a payment method

Customer balance

Unlike most payment methods, bank transfers don’t allow you to control the amount a customer sends to you, which means that customers might send too much or too little money by accident. To manage common overpayment and underpayment issues, Stripe holds your customer’s bank transfers in a customer balance that you can reconcile payments from, for a period of up to 90 days. This allows you to track how much your customers owe, regardless of how much or how often they send funds.

International payments

Bank transfer users in the US can accept international wire transfers (SWIFT). International wire transfers incur fees on the way to Stripe, which can result in an amount received that’s less than what the customer originally sent. Stripe-incurred fees appear on the balances page in the Dashboard, alongside other relevant Stripe fees. The amount shown in the cash balance is the amount that Stripe received from the customer.

Stripe doesn’t support refunds for international wires. You’re responsible for executing any refunds related to these payments.

Refunds

You can refund customer balance payments:

• Directly to the customer’s bank account
• Back to the customer’s cash balance, where the refund can be used towards another customer balance payment

To refund to the customer’s bank account, Stripe requires the customer’s bank account details. In some cases, Stripe receives these details when the customer transfers funds. When these details aren’t available, Stripe sends an email to the customer to collect bank account details and initiate a transfer when we receive those details.

If your customer has excess funds in their customer balance, you can initiate a return of funds through the Dashboard or the API. For more information, see Refund bank transfer payments.

Funding instructions

If you need to show bank account details to your customer before they make their first payment (for example, when they create their account), you can use the Funding Instructions API.

Sender information

You can determine the sender details of an incoming bank transfer through either the Dashboard or the API. Those details can include the name of the sender, the reference, and the network through which the transfer arrived.

Dashboard

API

1. In the Dashboard, navigate to the customer’s page.
2. Under Payment Methods, expand the cash balance tab.
3. Open the Cash Balance page by clicking View balance details.

Payment methods section

On the cash balance page, the Transactions section displays a list of the customer’s incoming and outgoing cash balance transactions.

List of all customer cash balance transactions

Incoming transfers have type Funding. Find the transfer you’re interested in and open its details page by clicking its description.

Funding details sender information

Connect

Stripe Connect can be used with bank transfers to process payments on behalf of connected accounts. Connect users can use bank transfers with the following account and charge types:

The on_behalf_of attribute isn’t supported.

Accepting bank transfer payments as the connected account

Direct charges require the connected account itself (not the platform) to have activated the bank transfers payment method—Connect platforms can use the bank_transfer_payments capability to determine whether this is the case for a connected account. Standard Connect accounts can request the capability from their Stripe Dashboard.

Activation process

The process varies by country, but in general for bank transfer payments, the required information is the same as what’s necessary to activate a Stripe account for payments. If the account doesn’t fulfill all the required information, the capability remains inactive with any issues highlighted on the capability object in the requirements.currently_due and requirements.disabled_reason fields until these issues have been addressed. After all the highlighted issues are resolved, the capability’s status changes to active, unless there are issues activating the account in general, in which case Stripe sends the Connect platform owner an email.

Unsupported businesses

Stripe can’t accept payments for certain types of businesses. In addition to the Restricted Business list, Stripe doesn’t support bank transfers if your business falls into any of the following categories:

Unsupported products and features

Bank transfers don’t support Payment Links.