Manage payout accounts for connected accounts

Learn how to manage external bank accounts and debit cards for connected accounts.

Payout accounts can be bank accounts or debit cards. Stripe recommends collecting external account details with the Connect Onboarding web form, which helps you:

Save design and development time.
Eliminate the need to store sensitive data such as account and routing numbers on your server.
Eliminate the need to build form validations when users enter account details.

In the US, we also recommend using Stripe Financial Connections, which lets your users securely link their financial accounts to your business. It helps you:

Increase onboarding conversion by preventing your accounts from having to interrupt the process to locate their account and routing numbers.
Reduce first payout failure rates by eliminating errors that result from manual entry of account and routing numbers.
Eliminate the need to store sensitive data such as account and routing numbers on your server.
Eliminate the need to build form validations when accounts enter account details in custom onboarding forms.
(Accounts v1 only) Enable your accounts to authenticate in fewer steps by reusing bank account details they’ve saved to Link. Accounts that save their account information at any of the Stripe businesses using Link can share their account details with your platform the next time they use Financial Connections.
Access additional information on an account’s external bank account, such as balances, ownership details, and transactions. You can mitigate fraud during onboarding by verifying that information, such as the name and address of the external bank account holder.

Financial Connections is free when you include Link. Otherwise, using it incurs fees.

Alternatively, if you use API onboarding for your connected accounts, you can collect payout account details with a custom form in your account onboarding flow.

Opting out of external account collection

For accounts where the platform is responsible for collecting requirements, such as Custom accounts, you may opt not to collect external account information in onboarding. You may do this if, for instance, you build your own onboarding flow where you want to collect external account information.

In embedded onboarding, you can disable external account collection by setting the external_account_collection feature on the Account Session to false. Alternatively, in hosted onboarding you can go to your Connect external accounts settings and then under Accounts where the platform is responsible for collecting requirements enable or disable collecting external account information. Note that this is off by default.

Collecting external accounts

Stripe-hosted onboarding for connected accounts uses a web form hosted by Stripe to collect the information required to onboard connected accounts. Stripe-hosted onboarding can collect both bank accounts and debit cards. You can use Financial Connections with Stripe-hosted onboarding to collect bank account details. However, you can’t use Financial Connections to collect debit card details.

If you’re responsible for connected accounts that can’t cover negative balances, including Custom and Express accounts, you can customize the collection flow of external accounts in your External account settings. These settings aren’t applicable if you’re using direct API calls from your own form.

In your External account settings, you can:

Enable or disable the collection of debit cards, by making a selection under Allow debit cards?.
Require that connected accounts must add at least one bank account before being able to add any other type of external account, such as a debit card. You can access this setting under Require at least one bank account?. This is useful for ensuring auto debit support.
Control whether or not connected accounts to add more than one external account in a given currency. There is a limit of five external accounts per currency. You can access this setting under Collect multiple external accounts per currency.

To allow Stripe to manually collect bank account details from connected accounts within the onboarding form, follow these steps:

Open your Connect settings and go to Payouts > External Accounts, where you can manage Connect onboarding options.
Under How will bank account details be collected?, select the option to manually collect bank account information.
For connected accounts where your platform collects account information when requirements change, including for Custom accounts, you must allow Stripe-hosted onboarding to collect external account details. Under Accounts where the platform is responsible for collecting requirements, allow Stripe to collect external account information by turning on the toggle.

Connect onboarding flow using a form to collect a payout account using manual entry.

Every country has a slightly different format for bank account details, and the form automatically displays the fields appropriate for your country of operation.