API onboarding

Build your own onboarding flow using Stripe's APIs.

With API onboarding, you use the Accounts API to build an onboarding flow, reporting functionality, and communication channels for your users. Stripe can be completely invisible to the account holder. However, your platform is responsible for all interactions with your accounts and for collecting all the information needed to verify them.

Additional responsibilities

With API onboarding, your custom flow must meet all legal and regulatory requirements in the regions where you do business. You must also commit resources to track changes to those requirements and collect updated information on an ongoing basis, at least once every six months. If you want to implement a customized onboarding flow, Stripe strongly recommends that you use embedded onboarding.

Establish requirements

The following factors affect the onboarding requirements for your connected accounts:

The origin country of the connected accounts
The service agreement type applicable to the connected accounts
The capabilities requested for the connected accounts
The business_type (for example, individual or company) and company.structure (for example, public_corporation or private_partnership)

Use the interactive form to see how changing these factors affects the requirements.

Requirements form

Create forms to collect information
Client-side

As a best practice, organize the required parameters into logical groupings or forms in your onboarding flow. You might wish to encode a mapping between the Stripe parameters and the logical groupings. Suggested logical groupings for parameters are shown in the first column of the example requirements table.

After you encode the required parameters into your application, generate UIs for the parameters corresponding to these requirements. For each parameter, design a UI form that includes:

Parameter label, localized to each supported country and language
Parameter description, localized to each supported country and language
Parameter input fields with data validation logic and document uploading where required

It’s important to architect your application logic to account for the possibility of additional parameters in the future. For example, Stripe might introduce new parameters, new verifications, or new thresholds that you must incorporate into your onboarding flows over time.

Changing any of the factors that determine your connected accounts’ requirements means you must also adjust your collection forms to handle the changed requirements. Country and service agreement type are immutable, while capabilities and business type are mutable.

To change an immutable field, create a new connected account with the new values to replace the existing account.
To change a mutable field, update the connected account.

Include the Stripe Terms of Service Agreement

Your connected accounts must accept Stripe’s terms of service before they can activate. You can wrap Stripe’s terms of service in your own terms of service.

Create a connected account
Server-side

Create an Account where your platform is liable for negative balances, Stripe collects fees from your platform account, and your connected accounts don’t have access to a Stripe-hosted Dashboard. Request any capabilities that your connected accounts need. Prefill the business type and any other available information matching your requirements.

Alternatively, you can create a connected account with type set to custom and desired capabilities.

If you don’t specify the country and service type agreement, they’re assigned the following default values:

The country defaults to the same country as your platform.
The service type agreement (tos_acceptance.service_agreement) defaults to full.

Determine the information to collect
Server-side

As the platform, you must decide if you want to collect the required information from your connected accounts up front or incrementally. Up-front onboarding collects the eventually_due requirements for the account, while incremental onboarding only collects the currently_due requirements.

	Up-front onboarding	Incremental onboarding
Advantages	Entails a single request for information (normally) Creates fewer problems in receiving payouts and maintaining processing ability Exposes potential fraudsters or connected accounts who refuse to provide required information	Onboards connected accounts quickly Results in higher onboarding rates
Disadvantages	Onboarding connected accounts can take longer Some legitimate new connected accounts might turn away due to the amount of information required before they complete the onboarding process	Creates a higher likelihood of disrupting business of an ongoing connected account

To determine whether to use up-front or incremental onboarding, review the requirements for your connected accounts’ locations and capabilties. While Stripe tries to minimize any impact to connected accounts, requirements might change over time.

For connected accounts where you’re responsible for requirement collection, you can customize the behavior of future requirements using the collection_options parameter. To collect the account’s future requirements, set collection_options.future_requirements to include.

To implement your onboarding strategy, inspect the requirements hash of the connected account you created. The requirements hash provides a complete list of the information you must collect to activate the connected account.

For incremental onboarding, inspect the currently_due hash in the requirements hash and build an onboarding flow that only collects those requirements.
For up-front onboarding, inspect thecurrently_due and eventually_due hashes in the requirements hash, and build an onboarding flow that collects those requirements.

{
  ...
  "requirements": {
    "alternatives": [],
    "current_deadline": null,
    "currently_due": [
      "business_profile.product_description",
      "business_profile.support_phone",
      "business_profile.url",
      "external_account",
      "tos_acceptance.date",
      "tos_acceptance.ip"
    ],
    "disabled_reason": "requirements.past_due",
    "errors": [],
    "eventually_due": [
      "business_profile.product_description",
      "business_profile.support_phone",
      "business_profile.url",
      "external_account",
      "tos_acceptance.date",
      "tos_acceptance.ip"
    ],
    "past_due": [],
    "pending_verification": []
  },
  ...
}

Handle liveness requirements

An account can have one or more Persons with a proof_of_liveness requirement. A proof_of_liveness requirement might require collection of an electronic ID credential such as MyInfo in Singapore, or by using Stripe Identity to collect a document or selfie. We recommend using Stripe-hosted or embedded onboarding to satisfy all variations of the proof_of_liveness requirement.

Stripe-hosted onboarding can complete all variations of proof_of_liveness requirements.

Create an Account Link using the connected account ID, and send the account to the url returned.

The account receives a prompt to complete the proof_of_liveness requirement, along with any other currently due requirements. Listen to the account.updated event sent to your webhook endpoint to be notified when the account completes requirements and updates their information. After the account completes the requirement, the account is redirected to the return_url specified.

Update the connected account
Server-side

Update the Account object with new information as your connected account progresses through each step of the onboarding flow. That allows Stripe to validate the information as soon as it’s added. After Stripe confirms acceptance of our terms of service, any change to the Account triggers reverification. For example, if you change the connected account’s name and ID number, Stripe reruns verifications.

When updating a connected account, you must handle any verification errors or HTTP error codes.

Handle verification errors
Server-side

When the connected account’s data is submitted, Stripe verifies it. This process might take minutes or hours, depending on the nature of the verification. During this process, the capabilities you requested have a status of pending.

Review status

You can retrieve the status of your connected account’s capabilities by:

Inspecting the Account object’s capabilities hash for the relevant capability.
Requesting capabilities directly from the Capabilities API and inspecting the status of the relevant capability.
Listening for account.updated events in your webhook endpoint and inspecting the capabilities hash for the relevant capability.

After verifications are complete, a capability becomes active and available to the connected account. Account verifications run continuously, and if a future verification fails, a capability can transition out of active. Listen for account.updated events to detect changes to capability states.

Confirm that your Connect integration is compliant and operational by checking that the account’s charges_enabled and payouts_enabled are both true. You can use the API or listen for account.updated events. For details on other relevant fields, check the account’s requirements hash. You can’t confirm the integration based on a single value because statuses can vary depending on the application and related policies.

charges_enabled confirms that your full charge path including the charge and transfer works correctly and evaluates if either card_payments or transfers capabilities are active.
payouts_enabled evaluates whether your connected account can pay out to an external account. Depending on your risk policies, you can allow your connected account to start transacting without payouts enabled. You must eventually enable payouts to pay your connected accounts.

You can use the following logic as a starting point for defining a summary status to display to your connected account.

Ruby
# Set your secret key. Remember to switch to your live secret key in production.
# See your keys here: https://dashboard.stripe.com/apikeys
Stripe.api_key = 'sk_test_BQokikJOvBiI2HlWgH4olfQ2'


def account_state(account)
  reqs = account.requirements

  if reqs.disabled_reason && reqs.disabled_reason.include?("rejected")
    "rejected"
  elsif account.payouts_enabled && account.charges_enabled
    if reqs.pending_verification
      "pending enablement"
    elsif !reqs.disabled_reason && !reqs.currently_due
      if !reqs.eventually_due
        "complete"
      else
        "enabled"
      end
    else
      "restricted"
    end
  elsif !account.payouts_enabled && account.charges_enabled
    "restricted (payouts disabled)"
  elsif !account.charges_enabled && account.payouts_enabled
    "restricted (charges disabled)"
  elsif reqs.past_due
    "restricted (past due)"
  elsif reqs.pending_verification
    "pending (disabled)"
  else
    "restricted"
  end
end

accounts = Stripe::Account.list(limit: 10)

accounts.each do |account|
    puts "#{account.id} has state: #{account_state(account)}"
end

Note

You can’t use the API to respond to Stripe risk reviews. You can enable your connected accounts to respond using embedded components, Stripe-hosted onboarding, or remediation links. You can also use the Dashboard to respond to risk reviews on behalf of your connected accounts.

Listen to the account.updated event. If the account contains any currently_due fields when the current_deadline arrives, the corresponding functionality is disabled and those fields are added to past_due.

Create a form with clear instructions that the account can use to correct the information. Notify the account, then submit the corrected information using the Accounts API.

If you plan to create custom flows to handle all your verification errors:

Review the details regarding all possible verification errors and how to handle them.
Test verification states.