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The fintech said its new Financial Connections service can be used to integrate bank account details with other Stripe products, while reducing payout failures and fraud.
Stripe has launched a new programme to allow businesses to establish direct connections with the bank accounts of their customers.
The fintech said Stripe Financial Connections will let businesses verify accounts for payments, check balances to reduce payment failures, retrieve historical transactions and confirm bank account ownership to reduce fraud.
Stripe said businesses can also use it to provide tools for customers to track budgets, pay bills and identify spending patterns.
“Direct bank account connections have historically been nearly impossible to establish on a programmatic basis,” Stripe said in a blogpost yesterday (4 May). “Financial Connections provides an easier solution: customers simply enter their online banking credentials and select the account they’d like to link.”
Jeremy Ricketts, product manager at church software platform Planning Center, said Financial Connections helps the platform “quickly and easily” verify bank accounts for donations.
“This is good for the churches we support, who can more easily accept donations, and good for their members, who can quickly link their bank accounts,” Ricketts said.
Stripe said businesses that use the new service can integrate bank account information with its other financial products including Stripe Connect, Capital, Identity, Issuing and Stripe Treasury.
It claimed platforms that use Financial Connections and Connect, the tool that helps companies integrate payments into their platforms or marketplaces, can reduce payout failures by 75pc.
“Businesses have been asking us for an easy, secure way to connect to and verify their customers’ bank accounts,” Stripe business lead Clara Liang said. “Stripe Financial Connections delivers just that.”
Stripe said the service now is available to businesses in the US, which can connect to more than 90pc of US bank accounts from a set of 5,000 financial institutions. The company did not state if or when the service would be available in other countries.
Stripe, founded by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison, has been rolling out more services that go beyond the payments processing it was originally built on, from tax tools to card issuing services.
Last month, the fintech appointed Microsoft veteran James Phillips as its new president of financial services, to help Stripe expand its portfolio.
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