Bank Transfers provide a safe way for customers to send money over bank rails. Stripe uses Virtual Bank Account (VBAN) numbers to automate reconciliation and prevent exposing your real account details to customers.

What’s changing:

Due to the recent regulatory changes in Spain affecting the issuance and use of Virtual IBANs (VBANs) related to the Prevention of Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing, Stripe will discontinue support for ES VBANs effective December 9, 2024.

Despite our outreach in August to gather additional KYC information in order to continue providing our services, we regret to inform you that we are unable to maintain support for ES VBANs beyond the specified date.

All other localized VBANs in Europe will continue to function as expected, and we are currently unaware of any imminent changes in other regions.

Can I request an extension?

Unfortunately, No. This decision is beyond Stripe’s control, so we cannot extend this timeline.

What’s the impact of migrating to the alternative VBANs?

You can issue VBANs localized to any of the following countries: BE, DE, FR, IE, NL. These VBANs will function in exactly the same way, regardless of where your customers are based. You can read more about creating localized VBANs in our docs.

There are also no changes to the customer’s EUR cash balance and any funds sent to new alternative VBANs will be reflected there accordingly.

What happens if I don’t take action?

Any future requests explicitly passing in the ES parameter value will fail with the error type invalid_request_error.

Any funds sent past December 9th, 2024 to ES VBANs will be rejected and returned to the sender.

To prevent disruption to your business, we strongly recommend making the required changes by December 9th, 2024.

What action do I need to take?

The required actions will vary based on your Stripe integration and please follow the migration guide to make the appropriate changes.

You will also need to inform your end customers about the changes so they can update their records with the new VBANs for future transactions.

Invoices

From October 28th 2024, invoice payment instructions on hosted surfaces (e-mail, PDF and Hosted Invoice Page) will no longer display ES VBANs. Our fallback mechanism will display an Irish (IE) VBAN instead, ensuring that your customers can still pay via EUR Bank Transfers.

Pricing

You will not incur additional Stripe fees for any replacement VBANs you create manually or Stripe creates automatically.

Support

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us at spain-bank-transfers@stripe.com. We’re here to help!