Controlling bank and debit card transfers

By default, any charge you make on behalf of a connected account accumulates in the connected account’s Stripe balance and is paid out on a daily rolling basis. However, Stripe offers fine-grained control over this behaviour for Custom accounts.

You can:

• Set the destination bank accounts and debit cards
• Control how frequently funds are automatically paid out
• Perform manual transfers
• Send funds instantly

Managing bank accounts and debit cards

Custom accounts have an external_accounts property: a list of all bank accounts and debit cards associated with the Stripe account. Any external account is a possible destination for funds.

{
  "id": 
"{{CONNECTED_ACCOUNT_ID}}",
  "object": "account",
  "external_accounts": {
    "object": "list",
    "has_more": false,
    "url": "/v1/accounts/acct_14qyt6Alijdnw0EA/external_accounts",
    "data": [
      {
        "id": 
"{{BANK_ACCOUNT_ID}}",
        "object": "bank_account",
        "account": "acct_14qyt6Alijdnw0EA",
        "account_holder_name": "Jane Austen",
        "account_holder_type": "individual",
        "bank_name": "STRIPE TEST BANK",
        "country": "US",
        "currency": "usd",
        "default_for_currency": false,
        "fingerprint": "sSZ2yLp0EZTH17cF",
        "last4": "6789",
        "metadata": {
        },
        "routing_number": "110000000",
        "status": "new"
      },
      {...},
      {...},
    ],
  ...
}

Destination accounts are added via the external_accounts parameter when creating or updating Stripe accounts. The value should be a bank account or debit card token returned from Stripe.js. Alternatively, you can provide a hash of the bank account details, but using Stripe.js is preferred as it prevents sensitive data from hitting your server.

When using debit cards as a transfer destination, the following restrictions apply:

• Must be a non-prepaid US Visa, Mastercard, or Discover
• Limited to 9,999 USD per transfer on Instant Payouts
• Generally limited to 3,000 USD per transfer otherwise

Managing multiple bank and debit accounts

By default, providing a new value for external_accounts while updating a Custom account replaces the existing account with the new one. To add additional bank accounts or debit cards to a connected account, use the Bank Account and Card creation API endpoints.

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/accounts/
{{CONNECTED_ACCOUNT_ID}}
/external_accounts \
  -u "
sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc
:" \
  -d external_account=
{{BANK_ACCOUNT_TOKEN_ID}}

When working with multiple currencies, Stripe automatically sends transfers to an associated bank account or debit card for its currency, thereby avoiding exchange fees. When there are multiple accounts available for a given currency, Stripe uses the one set as default_for_currency.

Stripe maintains a list of available country/currency combinations for your reference and to help your users choose from the supported options.

Payout information

When using automatic transfers, the transfer_schedule property on an account indicates how often the Stripe account’s balance is automatically paid out:

{
  ...
  "transfer_schedule": {
    "delay_days": 7,
    "interval": "daily"
  },
  ...
}

The delay_days property reflects how long it takes charges (or linked transfers) to become available for payout. This field is useful for controlling automatic payouts. For example, if you want your Custom accounts to receive their funds 2 weeks after the charge is made, set interval to daily and delay_days to 14. The default is the lowest permitted value for the account, determined by the connected account’s country. When setting or updating this field, you may pass the string minimum to choose the lowest permitted value.

There are four possible settings for the interval property:

• manual prevents automatic payouts. You will have to manually pay out the account’s balance using the Transfers API (acting as the connected account). Also set an account to manual to use Instant Payouts.
• daily automatically pays out charges delay_days days after they’re created. The delay_days value cannot be less than your own transfer schedule or less than the default transfer schedule for the account.
• weekly automatically pays out the balance once a week, specified by the weekly_anchor parameter (a lower-case weekday such as monday).
• monthly automatically pays out the balance once a month, specified by the monthly_anchor parameter (a number from 1 to 31).

Using manual transfers

If you set transfer_schedule[interval] to manual using the Accounts API, Stripe will hold funds in the account holder’s balance until told to pay them out (or until a maximum of 90 days have passed). To trigger a payout of these funds, use the Transfers API.

The Transfers API is only for moving funds from a connected Stripe account’s balance into their external account. To move funds between Stripe accounts, see creating separate charges and transfers or creating destination charges through the platform.

Standard transfers

As a basic transfer example, to have 10 USD sent from a Custom account’s Stripe balance to their external account:

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/transfers \
  -u 
sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc
: \
  -H "Stripe-Account: {{CONNECTED_STRIPE_ACCOUNT_ID}}" \
  -d "amount"=1000 \
  -d "currency"="usd" \
  -d "destination"="default_for_currency"

Setting destination=default_for_currency tells Stripe to transfer to the account’s default bank account or debit card for the given currency.

With a standard transfer, you can payout up to the user’s available balance. To find that amount, perform a retrieve balance call on their behalf.

Stripe tracks balance contributions from different payment sources in separate balances. The retrieve balance response breaks down the components of each balance by source type. For example, if you want to create a transfer specifically for a non-credit-card balance, specify the source_type in your request.

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/transfers \
  -u 
sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc
: \
  -d "amount"=24784 \
  -d "currency"="usd" \
  -d "destination"="default_for_currency" \
  -d "source_type"="bank_account"

Note that it is possible for any source’s balance component to go negative (through refunds or chargebacks), and transfers can’t be created for greater than the aggregate available balance.

Using Instant Payouts

With Instant Payouts, you can immediately send funds to a Custom account’s debit card. Funds typically appear in the associated bank account within 30 minutes, making it possible to go from charge to payout in mere moments.

To use Instant Payouts, specify instant for the method property when creating the transfer:

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/transfers \
  -u 
sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc
: \
  -H "Stripe-Account: {{CONNECTED_STRIPE_ACCOUNT_ID}}" \
  -d "amount"=1000 \
  -d "currency"="usd" \
  -d "method"="instant"

Instant Payouts differ from other manual transfers in a couple of ways:

• You can transfer an account’s available balance plus its pending balance
• Instant Payouts can be requested on weekends and holidays

Initially, platforms can transfer up to 500 USD per day – in total, across all connected accounts – through Instant Payouts. Contact us if you need this threshold increased.

Instant Payouts is available for all of the largest US banks, but a small percentage of banks do not yet support it. For those banks, you will have to fall back to standard payouts.

When you add a card to an account, Stripe returns a property available_payout_methods in the response, which will be a set containing the payout methods Stripe supports for that card. Only values in this set should be passed as the method when creating a transfer.

{
  "id": 
"{{CARD_ID}}",
  "object": "card",
  ...
  "account": "acct_1032D82eZvKYlo2C",
  "available_payout_methods": ["standard", "instant"],
}

If a Custom account’s card does not support Instant Payouts, you should clearly communicate to the owner of that account that they will not receive their payouts instantly.

Using webhooks with transfers

All transfer activity on connected accounts can be tracked using webhooks. (When using Connect, you should always be using webhooks.) Specific to transfers, you’ll see these events:

• transfer.created
• transfer.updated
• transfer.paid
• transfer.failed

For most transfers, these event notifications occur over a series of days. Instant Payouts typically send transfer.paid within 30 minutes.

If a transfer cannot be completed, a transfer.failed event occurs. The event’s failure_reason property indicates why.