| What you're describing isn't unique to Stripe. Pretty much every payment processor works this way. I've looked into a lot of them have yet to find a mainstream one that will deposit USD to a USD account in Europe, HK, SG, etc. (If Adyen does specifically that without big fees then great, but it's news to me.) What Stripe support is really telling you is that you need a US bank account to avoid the exchange fees. This is more or less correct. As you say, though, they're misguided is in pushing Atlas. It's probably the simplest way for you to get a US bank account, but in many ways it's the worst long-term option. That's because Stripe Atlas creates a C-Corp, which is liable for US corporation taxes and has to file them every year. You have two other options:
1) Get a US Bank account for your foreign company directly. This is not easy, many banks won't do it, but some will. E.g. I have a SVB account for a foreign corporation (with an EIN) so I can use Stripe in the US for my subscription app. 2) Form a US LLC that's fully owned by your EU corp. A single member LLC can elect to be tax transparent in the US. That means you don't have to pay US corporate taxes as long as you don't have business operations (employees, basically) in the US. With a US LLC it's relatively easy to open a US bank account, though you may need to travel to the US. If you want some expert tax advice for the US component of this setup here's a good guy to ask: http://ustax.bz/ Once you have a US bank account sorted you may need to migrate your Stripe subscriptions. This is not something that Stripe officially supports or will do for you, but after lots of digging with their support I was told that it's possible to do without requiring any re-opt-in from your subscribers. It's just that you need to do the migration yourself by transferring the subscription data. (Details escape me. Please confirm this with them yourself.) What's the benefit of all this, other than adding a few percent to your gross profits? Well, the market for online business buyers is much stronger in the US than anywhere else. I'm betting on the fact that it'll be significantly easier to sell a business with a US Stripe account than a business with a German / Irish / Hong Kong / Singapore / whatever stripe account. Of course we're talking a few percent here and a few percent here. Before diving into this rabbit hole I would ask yourself if marketing & sales for a few percent increase might not be less effort than all of the above. Right, that was a bit long-winded. I don't monitor my replies here much, but feel free to ping me if you have questions. public @ my_hn_username . org |
I know other payment processors don't do this either, and I remember the bad old days when you had to have your own merchant account and separate agreements with the card companies, and I wouldn't have expected this flexibility back then.
But, the way Stripe presents itself to its customers is that payments are made in whatever currency of the user, and it all drops in a bucket over at Stripe. You can accept payments before you've setup a bank account with Stripe. After that, and unrelated to whatever currencies users paid in, you can then transfer your Stripe balance to your bank account, in a few select major currencies. It looks like those two activities are completely separate, and one would assume the normal rules for transfers from one bank account to another would apply, i.e. it can be done in any currency regardless of the nationality of the bank accounts. But apparently that's not the case.