Bank transfers and SPEI

How bank transfers work

A bank transfer is a push payment: instead of money being pulled from the customer’s account, Stripe issues a set of bank details and the customer sends the money themselves from their own banking app. Nothing is collected until they do.

This is the opposite of a card payment or a direct debit, and it changes the shape of the transaction — the payment is created, sits pending while the customer goes away and makes the transfer, and only completes when Stripe matches the incoming funds against it. That can be minutes or days later.

Where it is available

Bank transfer is enabled per gateway in the Stripe connection settings, and must also be enabled on your Stripe account. The rail used depends on the currency:

Currency	Rail
MXN	SPEI (Mexico)
USD	US domestic bank transfer
GBP	UK domestic bank transfer
EUR	EU bank transfer
JPY	Japanese domestic transfer

A payment in any other currency will not offer bank transfer.

MXN needs a Mexican Stripe account

SPEI is gated by the Stripe account’s settlement currency. A UK, EU or US Stripe account will reject an MXN payment with currency mxn invalid — the merchant’s Stripe account must be registered in Mexico and settle in MXN. This is account configuration, not a setting in the platform.

The customer journey

• Payment created — the customer chooses Pay By Bank Transfer at checkout.
• Instructions issued — Stripe returns the bank details to pay to. For SPEI this is a CLABE and a reference; other rails return the equivalent account details. The customer is shown a link to those instructions.
• Transaction is pending — the payment is recorded as Pending. No money has moved yet.
• Customer transfers the money — from their own bank, using the details above.
• Stripe matches the funds — Stripe notifies the integration and the transaction is marked as Approved.

Bank transfers are for one-off payments. There is no mandate, so a bank transfer cannot be saved as a payment method or used for recurring contracts.

How this works in the platform

While the payment is waiting for the customer, the transaction is Pending and carries a sub-status saying so:

Field	Value
status	PENDING
sub_status	CUSTOMER_ACTION_REQUIRED
sub_status_reason	follow_bank_transfer_instructions, or partially_funded

sub_status is on the transaction and payment objects, and can be searched on (criteria=sub_status=CUSTOMER_ACTION_REQUIRED). A transaction with no sub_status — or NO_ACTION_REQUIRED — is not waiting on anybody.

Use it to tell the two kinds of pending apart: a pending card or direct debit is being processed by the bank, whereas a pending bank transfer is waiting for the customer to actually send the money.

Partial payments

If the customer transfers less than the full amount, Stripe holds what arrived and the payment stays pending with sub_status_reason of partially_funded. The customer is shown the amount still outstanding and can top it up against the same instructions.

If the customer never pays

An unfunded transfer produces no final notification from Stripe, so the integration sets an expiry window when the payment is created. The window is the “Bank Transfer - days before an unpaid pending payment expires” gateway setting (default 14 days, valid range 1–90).

When the window is reached, the integration re-checks the payment with Stripe:

State at the window	What happens
Funded after all	The transaction is marked Approved (covers a missed notification)
Funds in transit	Re-checked every 2 days, up to 3 times, then flagged Unresolved
Partly funded	Flagged Unresolved for manual review — money has arrived, so it is never auto-declined
Still unfunded	The payment is cancelled at Stripe and the transaction is Declined with “payment not received”

Multibanco is not covered by this window — Stripe expires its vouchers itself.

Refunds

SPEI (MXN) payments cannot be refunded from the platform. SPEI is a push-only rail and cannot be reversed, so a refund attempt is blocked with a message telling the operator to refund manually in the Stripe dashboard by returning the funds to the customer’s CLABE.

The other bank transfer rails have the same underlying limitation — the money is returned to the customer’s account via Stripe’s customer balance rather than being reversed down the original path — so treat bank transfer refunds as a manual operation in every currency.

Enabling bank transfer

• Enable bank transfers on your Stripe account (Stripe dashboard → Settings → Payment methods).
• In the Merchant Portal (Configure > Payment Processing), open the Stripe connection settings and turn on Enable Bank Transfer.
• Optionally set “Bank Transfer - days before an unpaid pending payment expires”. Leave it blank for the 14-day default.
• Select Save.

See Connecting Stripe for the full list of connection options.