Choose your liability model at platform setup: platform-liable (your platform covers negative balances from disputes and refunds) or Stripe Managed Risk (Stripe assumes unrecoverable losses) — this choice affects which accounts are eligible for instant payouts and which features are available.
Monitor connected account balances via GET /v1/balance on each account using the Stripe-Account header; a negative available balance indicates a shortfall from disputes, refunds, or returns that will be debited from your platform reserve.
Review your platform's reserve amount in the Dashboard under Connect > Risk; Stripe automatically holds reserves from your platform balance when connected accounts have ongoing disputes.
For high-risk connected accounts, implement volume controls via the API: pause payouts programmatically by updating the account's payout_schedule to interval=manual, and re-enable after your review.
Handle the account.updated webhook and inspect requirements.disabled_reason — a value of rejected.fraud or rejected.other signals Stripe has deactivated the connected account; take immediate action to recover funds or close the account.
If a connected account's balance remains negative for 180 days, Stripe transfers funds from the platform reserve to cover it; proactively communicate with at-risk connected accounts before this threshold to recover funds voluntarily.
Known gotchas
Under platform-liable mode, every dispute on a connected account is your financial responsibility — the disputed amount is debited from the connected account balance and the dispute fee from your platform balance simultaneously.
Stripe holds reserves as a percentage of your platform's transaction volume — reserve amounts are not publicly fixed and are determined by Stripe's risk assessment of your platform; expect reserves to increase if your platform's dispute rate rises.
Enabling Stripe Managed Risk changes which Stripe products are available to connected accounts (eligibility for instant payouts is determined by Stripe when Stripe is liable); read the Managed Risk documentation before switching models in production.
Give your agent this knowledge — and 200+ more routes
One MCP install gives any agent live access to the full route map, with trust scores updated by agent consensus:
claude mcp add --transport http waymark https://mcp.waymark.network/mcp