Legal Entity Sharing
Streamline connected account onboarding by sharing business information across accounts that belong to the same owner.
Legal Entity Sharing enables a connected account owner to reuse certain business information, such as their legal company name or business details, during account onboarding. The information can come from their Stripe user account or from an existing connected account that they own. They don’t have to resubmit that information or repeat related Know Your Customer (KYC) processes.
Some shared information remains synchronized between accounts. If the account owner updates it on one account, the update automatically applies to all shared accounts.
Use Case Example
Emma, an artisan jeweler, has been selling her wares through a personal website that accepts payments using Stripe Checkout. Looking to expand her business, she discovers an online marketplace called Artisan Market and decides to sign up. Artisan Market is a Stripe Connect platform.
Because Emma is the sole proprietor for both her website and her new marketplace venture, they share the same legal entity information. When Emma onboards her connected account for Artisan Market, Legal Entity Sharing lets her reuse some of the information she provided when setting up payments for her website. She doesn’t have to resubmit documentation for that information.
The wider exposure increases Emma’s sales, and she decides to expand by moving her business from her home studio to a dedicated workshop in a commercial building. Because Legal Entity Sharing synchronizes company address information between shared accounts, Emma only needs to update the business address on one of her accounts. Legal Entity Sharing automatically updates the address on the other account.
Availability
Legal Entity Sharing is available for accounts where Stripe is responsible for collecting requirements (the account’s controller.requirement_collection is stripe).
For accounts where controller.requirement_collection is platform, including Custom accounts, the account owner can copy some existing account information during onboarding. However, sharing doesn’t apply to future updates. Each account must be updated individually.
If the platform has requested any capabilities for the new account, the owner can only share information from accounts in the same country as the new account. Otherwise, they can share information from any of their existing accounts.
Stripe-hosted and embedded onboarding flows support Legal Entity Sharing. However, embedded onboarding flows require Stripe user authentication. If you set disable_stripe_user_authentication to true, your embedded onboarding flow can’t use Legal Entity Sharing.
API based onboarding flows can’t use Legal Entity Sharing.
When a legal entity is shared between accounts, some information is synchronized between shared accounts. If the account owner changes that information on one account, the changes automatically apply to all shared accounts. Other information can be copied from existing accounts during onboarding, but future updates to it aren’t synchronized.
Note
During onboarding, Stripe offers Legal Entity Sharing if the authenticated account owner has any existing accounts. The owner can select an existing account to share information with the new account, or they can choose to set up the new account from scratch. If they set up the new account from scratch, they can’t share it with existing accounts later. However, they can select it to share information when onboarding new accounts.
Legal Entity Sharing shares the following information between Accounts, and updates on one account automatically apply to shared accounts:
Legal Entity Sharing copies the following information from an existing account during onboarding. However, future updates to this information aren’t automatically copied to shared accounts: