Advice Needed For Platform

[Ross]

Hi Guys,

I need to know if it is possible.  Say I create a platform in the UK and have connected accounts outside the UK. I want customers on the website to be able to pay at once for multiple products from multiple connected accounts. Is this possible?

Separate charges and transfers says not but then it says "Alternatively, you can facilitate international payouts by using the card_payments capability to make charges directly on the connected account."  (https://stripe.com/docs/connect/account-capabilities#transfers-cross-border)

Which got me thinking whether it meant I can accept payment from the customer and then create charges on the connected accounts. I can't find an article on this though. This is what I need clarification on really.

Any workaround to fulfil this requirement would be great.

I'd have thought if destination charges to foreign connected accounts are possible this would be possible.

Thanks in advance. 

[Ali Riaz]

Hello!

Customers paying once for multiple products across multiple Connect accounts sounds like you want to leverage "Separate Charges and Transfers": https://stripe.com/docs/connect/charges-transfers.

"Separate Charges and Transfers" is where your Customer would make one purchase on your Platform account, and your Platform is then responsible for creating Transfers to the respective Connect accounts where the Customer purchased from.

There is a limitation here, in that you can only use Separate Charges and Transfers for Connect accounts in the EU, as a UK Platform.

The alternative here to support Connect accounts beyond the EU would be to use "Direct Charges'": https://stripe.com/docs/connect/direct-charges. "Direct Charges" are not limited by region because your Platform is creating payments directly on Connect accounts.

In the "Direct Charges" model, your platform creates PaymentIntents directly on the Connect account. One limitation here is that if you have a Customer purchasing from 2 Connect accounts, you cannot bundle it as one payment, this would be two distinct PaymentIntents on two different Connect accounts.

International fund flows are tricky, so I highly recommend working with the Support team at https://support.stripe.com/contact for your use-case.

Cheers!
Ali

[Ali Riaz]

Hello Ross,

> I assume destination charges would be okay instead of direct charges?

Destination Charges alone will not work in a cross border scenario (where your Platform is in a different region than the Connect account).

However, you should use Destination Charges with the "on_behalf_of" parameter which makes the Connect account the settlement merchant and should allow you to make payments on behalf of Connect accounts in other regions.

> I can see there is a country attribute on the connected account object

Correct, fetching the Connect account and looking at its `country` field is what I would recommend and ideally storing that locally so you don't have to fetch a Connect account before every single payment (as that would adds an additional API requests to your payment flow).

A method/API like the one you're referring to doesn't exist in the API.

Hope that helps!
Ali

On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 3:34 PM Ross <ros...@googlemail.com> wrote:

Hi

Thanks, I assume destination charges would be okay instead of direct charges?

Anyway, do you know if there is a nice way of checking through the api whether a connected account is outside of the platform's region?  I can see there is a country attribute on the connected account object but I'd rather there was a method which just tells me rather than having to create my own lookup table.

[Ross]

Hi

Thanks, I assume destination charges would be okay instead of direct charges?

Anyway, do you know if there is a nice way of checking through the api whether a connected account is outside of the platform's region?  I can see there is a country attribute on the connected account object but I'd rather there was a method which just tells me rather than having to create my own lookup table.

On Monday, May 24, 2021 at 8:41:49 PM UTC+1 ali...@stripe.com wrote: