Stripe, built into your payments.

Who Stripe is

Stripe is a payments company with dual headquarters in San Francisco and Dublin, known for the APIs developers use to take payments online. It now calls itself the programmable financial services company, and its products span payments, platforms and marketplaces, and card issuing.

In Europe it works through e-money institutions: Stripe Technology Europe, authorised by the Central Bank of Ireland, and Stripe Payments UK, authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority. Online businesses, platforms and marketplaces use it, which is why four of our modules connect to it.

What it does in your platform

• Card acquiring

  Processes your merchants' card payments online, in apps and in person, where Stripe Terminal's SDKs take Tap to Pay on iPhone and tap to pay on Android NFC phones. Captures, refunds and payouts come back as webhook events and are matched to the ledger.

• Payouts

  Stripe Connect onboards your merchants or sellers as connected accounts, with Stripe's hosted or embedded onboarding running the identity checks, and pays them out to their bank accounts or debit cards, instantly where Stripe offers Instant Payouts.

• Card issuing

  Stripe Issuing gives out virtual and physical Visa or Mastercard cards: commercial cards in the US, the UK and the EEA, consumer cards in the US, and stablecoin-backed programmes in parts of Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa. Each authorisation reaches the module as a real-time request it approves or declines from your ledger.

• Checkout

  Processes cards and wallets in your hosted checkout, with Apple Pay, Google Pay, network tokens for saved cards and 3-D Secure when the risk calls for it.

How the connection works

Each module calls Stripe's API from your platform, and Stripe reports back through webhooks signed in the Stripe-Signature header. Your apps only receive the client secret of the payment in front of them.

1. A payment is created

   When a buyer checks out, the module creates the payment on Stripe and hands its client secret to Stripe's Payment Element on the page, or to Stripe's mobile SDK in the app.

2. The buyer pays

   By card, Apple Pay or Google Pay, with 3-D Secure if the risk calls for it. The card details go straight to Stripe, never through your servers.

3. A signed event

   Stripe confirms the payment with an event signed with your endpoint's secret, and the module records it in the ledger.

4. The seller's share

   With separate charges and transfers, the module moves the seller's share to their connected account and keeps your commission on the platform.

5. The payout

   Stripe pays the connected account out to its bank account or debit card, and payout events tell the seller, in the app, when the money is on its way. Refunds and disputes arrive as signed events too.

Next to other providers

Stripe can run one module or several. Card payments in the checkout can be spread across processors, acquiring traffic can be split for resilience, and in payouts your own bank partners come first, with Stripe Connect covering the rest.

Each module owns its screens and records, so moving a module from Stripe to another provider later does not change your apps, and past payments stay in your ledger.

When Stripe fits best

How we get you live

• The contract

  We help you get your Stripe account and contract in place, with Connect and Issuing enabled where your model needs them.

• The configuration

  We set up the payment methods, the onboarding of your connected accounts, payout schedules and, for Issuing, the card programme and its spending controls.

• The keys

  Secret keys and webhook signing secrets go into your platform's secrets and nowhere else. Apps only receive the client secret of one payment at a time.

• A full test run

  Everything runs first in a Stripe sandbox, with Stripe's test cards, from checkout to payout and card authorisation, before your first real payment.