Pause payments and payouts on connected accounts

Support risk management by controlling the flow of funds into and out of your connected accounts.

Accounts v2 not supported

This workflow isn’t available when using Accounts v2.

Platforms can pause payments or payouts on accounts where they’re liable for negative balances, including Express and Custom accounts, through the Connected Account details Dashboard page. Unlike rejecting an account, you can pause payments or payouts regardless of the connected account’s balance. You can unpause payments or payouts at any time through the same page.

Effects of pausing payments or payouts

Pausing payments

Pausing payments blocks creation of any charges. It also makes the transfer, card_payments and other payment methods capabilities inactive.

Pausing payouts

Pausing payouts blocks creation of both automatic and manual payouts. The pause also stops processing of any in-flight payouts, which remain in pending status for up to 10 days:

If you unpause payouts within 10 days of a payout’s creation, the payout resumes.
If you don’t unpause payouts within 10 days of a payout’s creation, the payout is canceled and the funds are returned to the connected account’s balance.

Note

You can pause payments in both live mode and in a sandbox. However, we don’t enforce it in a sandbox. Pausing payments in a sandbox deactivates the corresponding capabilities on the account, but that doesn’t block the creation of charges.

After performing an action on a connected account, you can view the change in the account’s status, which is reflected in the Accounts API. In the API response for the connected account, the charges_enabled or payouts_enabled fields return false depending on the action taken, and the requirements hash has a disabled_reason of platform_paused.

{
  "id": "{{CONNECTED_ACCOUNT_ID}}"
,
  ...
  "charges_enabled": false,
  "payouts_enabled": false,
  "requirements": {
    "disabled_reason": "platform_paused"
  }
}

Filter connected accounts by risk action

When viewing the Connected account list page in your Dashboard, you can filter for the accounts that you have restricted either payments or payouts for.

Connected account notifications

Actioned accounts with access to the Express Dashboard see a notice there, explaining that their platform paused payments or payouts on their account, and telling them to direct any questions to their platform.

Actioned accounts without access to a Stripe-hosted Dashboard, including Custom accounts, don’t see any communication from Stripe. You’re responsible for notifying them when you pause their payments or payouts.