Onboarding solutions for Custom accounts

Stripe offers several ways to onboard Custom connected accounts. You can choose the best onboarding method for your business.

API-based onboarding

API-based onboarding involves building out each aspect of your site’s onboarding user interface to call the corresponding Stripe APIs. Your integration must satisfy all of Stripe’s onboarding requirements.

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.

Create forms to collect information

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. Country and service agreement type are immutable, while capabilities and business type are mutable.

• To change an immutable field such as country or service agreement type, create a new connected account with the new values. Doing so produces new requirements for you to incorporate in your collection flows.
• To change a mutable field such as capabilities or business type, update the connected account. Doing so produces new requirements for you to incorporate in your collection flows.

Include Stripe Terms of Service Agreement

Your connected accounts must accept Stripe terms of service before they can be activated. You can wrap Stripe terms of service in your own terms of service.

Create the Connected Account

Use the Create Account API to create a connected account with country, service type agreement, desired capabilities, business type, and any other information matching your requirements. At a minimum, you must specify capabilities and type. If you don’t specify other parameters, they’re assigned the following default values:

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

The following code sample creates a Custom connected account with card_payments and transfers capabilities under a full service agreement for an individual.

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/accounts \
  -u "
sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc
:" \
  -d country=US \
  -d type=custom \
  -d "capabilities[card_payments][requested]"=true \
  -d "capabilities[transfers][requested]"=true

Take your account through the onboarding flow

You can enable connected accounts in either of two ways:

• Incremental onboarding strategy: Collect the minimum required information up front and the rest later
• Upfront onboarding strategy: Collect all information up front

The incremental onboarding strategy speeds up initial onboarding but requires additional information collection later on. The upfront onboarding strategy minimizes enablement disruption throughout the connected account’s lifecycle at the expense of a lengthier application process. You can decide which strategy better suits your use case.

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

• If you choose the incremental onboarding strategy, inspect the currently_due field in the requirements hash and build an onboarding flow that only collects for the listed parameters.
• If you choose the upfront onboarding strategy, inspect the eventually_due field in the requirements hash and build an onboarding flow that collects for all the listed parameters.

{
  ...
  "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": []
  },
  ...
}

Update the Connected Account

Update the connected account object with new information as it progresses through your onboarding flow. Perform an Update Account call, identifying the connected account by the id value you stored earlier.

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/accounts/
{{CONNECTED_ACCOUNT_ID}} \
  -u "
sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc
:" \
  --data-urlencode "business_profile[url]"="https://furever.dev" \
  -d "tos_acceptance[date]"=1609798905 \
  -d "tos_acceptance[ip]"="8.8.8.8"

Stripe validates every update to a connected account. Update the account at each step in onboarding to allow Stripe to validate information as soon as it’s added, while your users continue through the onboarding flow. After Stripe confirms acceptance of our terms of service, any changes to the connected account trigger 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 returned by the Accounts API.

Embedded onboarding

Embedded onboarding is a highly themeable onboarding UI with limited Stripe branding. Connected account users interact with the embedded component without ever leaving your application. Embedded onboarding uses the Accounts API to read the requirements and generate an onboarding form with robust data validation and that is localized for all Stripe-supported countries. In addition, embedded onboarding handles all:

• Business types
• Configurations of company representatives
• Verification document uploading
• Identify verification and statuses
• International bank accounts
• Error states

You can integrate embedded onboarding in a few lines of code, while API-based onboarding requires you to construct custom logic. To integrate embedded onboarding, follow our embedded components guide and integrate the Account onboarding embedded component.

Stripe hosted onboarding

Stripe hosted onboarding allows you to redirect your user to Stripe to complete the onboarding process in a co-branded interface. Create an Account Link and direct your user to the hosted onboarding flow. The return_url allows Stripe to return the user to your application and allow you to progress the connected account accordingly.

To integrate Stripe hosted onboarding, follow our Stripe hosted onboarding guide.

Verification handling

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 required. During this process, the capabilities you requested have a pending status.

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, the 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.

# 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_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc'

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

Handle verification errors

Handle verification failures differently depending on your onboarding flow.