Australia BECS Direct Debit payments

Stripe users in Australia can accept Australia BECS Direct Debit payments from customers with an Australian bank account.

As part of the payment process, businesses must collect a mandate that includes the customer’s bank account details (account holder’s name, the Bank-State-Branch or BSB number, and the bank account number) and must also accept the mandate Service Agreement. This gives the business an authorization to debit the account. Stripe can generate this mandate for businesses to present to their customers.

Australia BECS Direct Debit is a reusable, delayed notification payment method. This means that it can take up to three business days to receive notification on the success or failure of a payment after you initiate a debit from the customer’s account.

For new users, Australia BECS Direct Debit transactions have a default limit of 10,000 AUD per transaction and 10,000 AUD per week. If you need higher limits, contact support.

Verification requirements

Using Australia BECS Direct Debit requires you to complete additional identity verification steps. We prompt you to complete these steps after you request access from the Payment methods settings. If you require further assistance, please contact support.

Payment flow

Preview the payment flow using the test information below or view the sample code on GitHub.

• Any name
• Any email address
• Test BSB number: 000000
• Test bank account number: 000123456

Preview Australia BECS Direct Debit payment flow

Get started

You don’t have to integrate Australia BECS Direct Debit and other payment methods individually. If you use our front-end products, Stripe automatically determines the most relevant payment methods to display. Go to the Stripe Dashboard and enable Australia BECS Direct Debit. To get started with one of our hosted UIs, follow a quickstart:

• Checkout: Our prebuilt, hosted checkout page.
• Elements: Our drop-in UI components.

Other payment products

The following Stripe products also let you add Australia BECS Direct Debit from the Dashboard:

• Invoicing
• Payment Links
• Subscriptions

If you prefer to manually list payment methods or want to save Australia BECS Direct Debit details for future payments, see the following guides:

• Accept an Australia BECS Direct Debit payment
• Save Australia BECS Direct Debit details for future payments

Timing

With Australia BECS Direct Debit, it can take several business days for funds to become available in your Stripe balance. The number of business days it takes for funds to become available is called the settlement timing. Payments are generally submitted on the same day that they’re created, but are processed on the following business day if they’re created on a non-business day or after the cutoff time.

You can access the expected_debit_date for Australia BECS Direct Debit under payment_method_details for Charges. This is an estimated date of when the funds might be debited. This estimate isn’t guaranteed and the actual date might vary. This information is available in API responses and in charge.updated, charge.succeeded, and charge.failed webhook events when the debit date can be determined.

The following table describes the settlement timings for Australia BECS Direct Debit payments that Stripe offers. T+x refers to x business days after submission, which might differ from the payment creation date.

This table shows a sample timeline for Standard Settlement in business days from the time (T) that a payment is submitted:

To configure your preferred settlement speed for Australia BECS Direct Debit, contact Stripe support.

Debit notification emails

The Australia BECS Direct Debit scheme advises that you notify your customer when a mandate is established and each time you debit their account. By default, Stripe automatically sends emails to the customer.

If you decide to send your customer a custom notification:

• Turn off Stripe emails in the Stripe Dashboard email settings.

• Use the payment_intent.processing event to trigger debit initiation emails.

• It’s best to share (a link to) the mandate in the mandate notification

• The pre-debit notifications ideally includes:

  • The last 4 digits of the customer’s bank account
  • The amount to be debited
  • Your contact information
  • The day you plan to debit the customer’s bank account

• The Australia BECS Direct Debit guidelines suggest sending notifications at least 14 calendar days before you create a payment, but this isn’t mandatory. The default Stripe pre-debit email happens the day before the account gets debited. These pre-debit notifications should help you avoid unnecessary debit failures and disputes. For recurring payments of the same amount (for example, a subscription of a fixed amount), you can include multiple upcoming debits with corresponding dates in a single notice.

Disputes

Australia BECS Direct Debit provides a dispute process for bank account holders to dispute payments so you should familiarize yourself with this process if you decide to accept Australia BECS Direct Debit payments.

For up to 7 years, a customer can dispute a payment through their bank on a “no questions asked” basis. Their bank honors all disputes within this period. If they dispute a charge and their bank accepts the request to return the funds, Stripe immediately removes the funds from your Stripe balance.

If a dispute gets created, Stripe sends both the charge.dispute.created and charge.dispute.closed webhook events, and deducts the amount of the dispute and associated dispute fee from your Stripe balance.

Unlike credit card disputes, all Australia BECS Direct Debit disputes are final and can’t be appealed. If a customer successfully disputes a payment, contact them to resolve the situation. If you can come to an agreement and your customer is willing to return the funds to you, they need to make a new payment.

Mandates

During the payment process, businesses must collect a mandate that authorizes them to debit the account. In the Australia BECS Direct Debit system, these mandates are called Direct Debit Requests, or DDRs.

Bank account holders can request the cancellation of active mandates at any time. To cancel a mandate, a bank account holder must either contact their bank or the party they established the mandate with. Canceling a mandate invalidates any future debit requests that you issue using it. If you want to accept additional payments from your customer, establish a new mandate with them.

Mandate events

You can see the events in your Dashboard, but we recommend you still set up a webhook endpoint.

Refunds

Refunds for payments made with Australia BECS Direct Debit must be issued within 90 days from the date of the original payment. Refunds require additional time to process (typically 3-5 business days). If you accidentally debit your customer, contact them immediately to avoid a payment dispute.

Refunds are processed only after the payment process completes. If you create a full or partial refund on a payment that hasn’t completed yet, the refund process starts when the Charge object’s status transitions to succeeded. If the Charge object’s status transitions to failed, the full or partial refund is marked as canceled because the money was never debited from the customer’s bank account.

Australia BECS Direct Debit doesn’t explicitly label refunds when they’re deposited back into a bank account. Instead, refunds are processed as a credit and include a visible reference to the original payment’s statement descriptor.

Due to longer settlement time periods and how banks process Australia BECS Direct Debit transactions, there is potential for confusion between you, your customer, your customer’s bank, and Stripe. For example, your customer might contact both you and their bank to dispute a payment. If you proactively issue your customer a refund while the customer’s bank also initiates the dispute process, your customer might receive two credits for the same transaction.

When issuing a refund, inform your customer immediately that the refund can take up to 5 business days to arrive in their bank account. Stripe won’t automatically send the customer any email to inform them about this.

Statement descriptors

Every Australia BECS Direct Debit payment shows two fields on the customers’ bank statements: the name of the merchant and the lodgement reference unique to this transaction.

For Australia BECS Direct Debit payments created with Stripe, the name of the merchant is your Stripe account’s statement descriptor. You can override this default behavior for every transaction independently by using a dynamic statement descriptor. To do so, specify the statement_descriptor parameter when creating the PaymentIntent.

The table below illustrates the merchant name and lodgement reference behavior you can expect on the customer’s bank statement:

Each bank in Australia formats these fields differently. Depending on your customer’s bank, some fields might appear in all lowercase or all uppercase.

Statement descriptors and Connect

The charge type of Connect payments changes the statement descriptor and the merchant name, which appear on the customer’s bank statement.

You can’t use a mandate collected for a PaymentIntent on_behalf_of a connected account with a different connected account.

Billing Retries Private preview

With Direct Debit retries, Stripe can automatically retry failed Direct Debit payments caused by insufficient funds. You can turn on retries for recurring subscription invoices, one-off invoices, or both.