Hi folks - great news!

The new Visual Form Builder (VFB) forms in GiveWP 3.0+ use the Stripe Payment Element API, which allows ACH payments without any 3rd party integrations. This is a great step forward as now there are many payment methods available just within Stripe. You can find these here: https://dashboard.stripe.com/settings/payment_methods

When testing the new VFB forms, ensure to enable the Stripe Payment Element gateway at Donations >> Settings >> Payment Gateways >> Stripe >> {Visual Form Builder}.

The form templates from the version 2 era (also know as Option-Based Form Editor forms - Multi Step/Classic/Legacy) do not utilise the Stripe Payment Element. Plaid + Stripe will continue to be the only way to accept ACH with Stripe in Option-Based Form Editor forms.

Hello again!

Stripe, being awesome, has recently announced that they are now supporting ACH Direct Debit payments to US-based accounts. This means that Stripe accounts in this US can make US-to-US bank transfers without needing something like Plaid. That said, there are a couple things to be aware of:

First, this requires the use of mandates which are covered by a few of the products. For GiveWP, the most notable is their Stripe Elements API, used for custom payment flows (such as GiveWP does). This is their newest API and, while it is on our roadmap, we do not yet support it. We really do want to, though, as it's very exciting. We're already introducing it to our upcoming GiveWP 3.0 work.

Next, please pay attention to the US limits of the new Stripe feature. If you do international transfers then it may very well be best to continue using Plaid, as they work with tens of thousands of banks, covering numerous countries.

Thank you for voting on this! It helps us to know what's most important to our customers!

Here's a new feature request as of May 2022 for this: https://feedback.givewp.com/feature-requests/p/allow-for-additional-payment-methods-via-stripe-checkout

Stripe announced in May 2022 that they have integrated ACH into Stripe Checkout, from my understanding, this makes Plaid to be redundant, especially if the user experience is cleaner in the Stripe Checkout side.

Stripe Support relayed this to me:

To set up ACH payment method via API, when creating a new Checkout Session, you need to:

Add us_bank_account to the list of payment_method_types.

Make sure all your line_items use the usd currency.

Set the permissions parameter to include payment_method.

A comprehensive guide can also be checked here:

Hi Jason,

Just wanted to reply to your comments about the native Stripe ACH integration vs Plaid ACH. The WP Simple Pay plugin just implemented Stripe native ACH, and I gave it a go with one of our other clients to see what the experience is like. I can confirm there were no micro-transactions involved, in fact, it worked very similar to the Plaid integration. I was presented with a Stripe-branded window where I selected my bank, and was prompted for my online bank login credentials. After entering those, I was presented with a window showing me what data Stripe was requesting to access from my bank account, and had to approve that and accept terms. It then said my bank account was linked, and took me back to the payment form, where I could click the "Pay $10 Now" button to finish the transaction, which immediately made the donation.

So the customer experience didn't seem to differ much, if any, from the Plaid customer experience. And it sure would be nice, on the business side, to not have to deal with Plaid.

EDIT: And now I see your pinned comment was from 2021, not 2022. :) Hopefully you are able to take a look at the newly released API now. Thanks!

Connecting directly to Stripe for ACH payments without using yet another 3rd party platform is a useful feature. I hope to see this become available for merchants sooner. Thanks!

Hi folks!

I wanted to hop in on this feature request to explain a few things often miss this when learning about ACH transfers via Stripe. The best way of doing this is to explain how setting up for ACH transfers work.

Before money can be moved, bank accounts verified and authorized. Authorization simply means that the account owner has given you clear consent to pull money directly from their account. Verification is the tricky part.

Stripe offers two means of verifying the account. The first option is to use Plaid. What Plaid does is make a way for users to verify their account by logging into their bank's system. This is incredibly complex and requires Plaid to coordinate with every single bank. The second method is through what's called micro-transactions, which you may have even experienced. This is where a few cents is deposited into the account in two transactions. Once the amount clears, then the amounts are provided to the Stripe account owner to enter in and verify. What's really heavy here is that this manual process has to be done — the donor would have to enter their account credentials, wait 1-2 days, send the amounts to you, and then you enter those amounts in Stripe.

So if we were to integrate with Stripe directly, the only part of this we'd be able to smooth out is that donors could enter the micro-transaction amounts and it would automatically send those to Stripe. But the donor would still have to provide set up their account 1-2 days making a donation and then verify the account.

This is is a tremendous amount of work for potential donors to go through in order to use their bank account. Most donors expect to spend a couple minutes being generous. This process would require multiple points of focus and follow-up. I hope this helps to pain the picture as to (1) why Plaid is such an amazing service and (2) we haven't gone the path of building out this direct integration. For the vast majority of customers this path to making a donation is simply too cumbersome, and we want to provide features that help as many people as possible.

Hi, I would like to be able to use Stripe with GiveWP to do ACH without having to have yet another third party like Plaid. Too many accounts; too many fees. This should be able to happen! Thank you!