Nikolas Schröter

[fervent pike]

What's the question?

[rare perch]

We are launching a globally available marketplace with Stripe Connect and would like our users to pay in one of Stripe's 135+ local currencies.

As part of the seperate charges and transfers flow, we understand that we accumulate balances in all currencies we add to our platform account.

Since our platform is based in Germany, we can add a bunch of them. For all that are not supported, the funds get auto-converted with Stripe FX fee applied.

Now when we have a seller that onboarded in a country, where we can pay out in one of the balances we accumulate in, there is no issue, since we can simply transfer out of our balance.

But what about if the seller is getting paid out in a currency that we dont have balance in. How do we insure the seller receives the right amount, when Stripe does not offer exchange rates in advance of the transfer, but only after it?

[fervent pike]

But what about if the seller is getting paid out in a currency that we dont have balance in. How do we insure the seller receives the right amount, when Stripe does not offer exchange rates in advance of the transfer, but only after it?
Have you tested this theory? Can you share an example? My understanding is that FX would occur on the platform and the connected account would receive the net amount set on the Transfer in nominated currency

[rare perch]

I have only tested this out via the dashboard in Test mode, but I can also test it via the SDK. The dashboard only allows me to transfer an amount in one of the balances our platform account has, not specify the amount in the Connect account currency.

I will test it via the SDK, and get back on this, if you wish.

[fervent pike]

Let me check on this

Yes, confirmed. All you can do is transfer in a nominated currency and we'll handle the FX, unfortunately

I think the best approach in this instance would be to use a single currency for all transfers (i.e. EUR) and be very verbose in your messaging that you will send €X EUR converted to their local currency

Alternatively you could attempt the FX calculation yourself and over inflate the transfer amount, but more risky

[rare perch]

We already implemented a workaround by injecting the test mode secret in our production environment, where we create a transfer in test mode in the desired currency, and then get the exchange rate from that.

But this feels very hacky to us, so we wanted to make sure there is no alternative.

[fervent pike]

Got it, nothing else right now that can help with this I'm afraid

[rare perch]

Is there a cap on how many transactions a user can have in test mode?

because we are creating a test mode transfer before every transfer we do in production. The result will be that at some point a user in test mode will have hundreds of thousands of payments/transfers.

Is this going to be an issue?

[fervent pike]

No limits