Guides An important update for Stripe Connect

An important update for Stripe Connect

We’re making important updates to Connect to adapt to evolving financial regulations and partner obligations that will impact onboarding requirements, and optimize the onboarding experience for platforms and their users. This guide outlines what’s new to Connect and what changes you’ll need to make to your Stripe integration.

Background

Global payments regulations aim to create a safer, more secure financial ecosystem by helping prevent crimes like money laundering, fraud, and tax evasion. Financial regulators around the world enforce Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements to ensure that identity information is collected and verified from certain types of businesses. These information collection requirements are frequently updated by financial services regulators, card networks, and other financial institutions. Compliance rules have also become more complicated, and requirements can vary by business model, financial transaction type, and country.

For platforms, managing this complexity while minimizing friction to the onboarding experience is an ongoing challenge, especially as they expand to multiple global markets. 42% of online businesses say that it’s harder to do business internationally today than it was five years ago.

What’s new with Connect

At Stripe, we’re heavily invested in making these compliance tasks easier to manage so platforms can focus on building their business. We’re introducing updates to Connect to continue to meet global onboarding requirements and optimize the onboarding experience for your users:

  • Conversion-optimized onboarding tools that replace the need for you to design your own identity verification flows and dynamically adapt to compliance requirements in multiple markets.
  • A new capabilities framework that ensures you’re only collecting the necessary information from a user, keeping your onboarding flows lean and optimized for conversion. In some cases, this may reduce onboarding requirements for certain types of accounts.
  • Improvements to our Accounts API that help you manage ongoing business and identity verification requirements.

Please note that these changes will require updates to your Stripe integration.

Powerful, automated onboarding tools

We’ve created conversion-optimized, prebuilt onboarding flows to help you collect required identity information and onboard your users as quickly as possible without needing to build or maintain your own flows.

The desktop- and mobile-ready design supports multiple languages and countries, and automatically updates whenever local compliance requirements change. The form can be customized to match your company’s branding and easily integrates with your existing signup flow for a consistent user experience from start to finish.

The Connect onboarding flow securely collects required information from your connected accounts, based on your business model and local compliance requirements.

A new capabilities framework

We’ve updated Connect with a new capabilities framework that helps optimize your onboarding flow. Information collection can be customized based on the payments capabilities your connected accounts need—like accepting card payments from customers, or just accepting payment transfers from your platform—along with other factors like their business type or country.

The following capabilities can now be requested for your connected accounts:

The connected account accepts card payments directly from their customers.
The connected account accepts card payments directly from their customers.

The card payments capability lets a connected account process credit and debit card payments directly from their customers through Stripe. For example, a website-building platform can use the card payments capability to enable sellers to accept payments directly from their customers. Onboarding requirements are generally stricter for connected accounts who use Stripe to directly process payments. Setting this capability ensures that the connected account provides the appropriate identity information to Stripe.

The platforms accepts card payments from customers and transfers the funds to the connected account.
The platforms accepts card payments from customers and transfers the funds to the connected account.

The transfers capability lets a connected account receive payouts and transfers from your platform. For example, an on-demand ride sharing platform can use the transfers capability to make payouts to drivers from their Stripe platform. Depending on the market, onboarding requirements can be less strict for connected accounts who receive payments from a platform using the transfers capability.

In the coming months, we’ll introduce capabilities to support additional payment methods and features like card issuing.

Improvements to the Accounts API

We’ve updated the API to support our capabilities framework and allow you to set capabilities when creating accounts. The new Persons object in the Accounts API will help you more easily identify and manage identity verification information, and clarify when more information is required from a connected account.

What this means for your Stripe integration

Changes to your Stripe integration will depend on whether you’re onboarding Standard, Express, or Custom accounts, and which capabilities your users will need.

If you’re onboarding Standard accounts, no action is necessary. We’ll automatically set the relevant capabilities for your users to collect the optimal amount of information.

If you’re onboarding Express or Custom accounts, you’ll need to make changes to your integration and request capabilities for new and existing connected accounts. Some platforms may need to collect additional information for previously onboarded accounts. More information can be found in your Stripe Dashboard.

How to get help

Updating your Stripe integration is an important step for your platform, and we’re here to help.