---
title: [legacy] ACH bank account setup
slug: legacy-ach-bank-account-setup
published_at: 2020-02-13 17:00:16 +0000
updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:51:04 +0000
summary: 
description: Updated video: https://youtu.be/Q9Muz8OEZYk   Join us for Stripe Developer Office Hours and get your questions about taking payment directly from a bank account with ACH. Our engineers will walk you through the basics of Collecting and Verifying bank account details.  ## Table of contents  00:05 Intro 01:02 See what we'll build 03:12 Initialize server code 08:15 Setup client with Plaid link 13:17 Setup exchange token route 24:00 Create test charge 25:00 Manually verify bank details with microdeposits  ## Resources Official Guide - https://stripe.com/docs/ach  ## Presenter CJ Avilla, Developer Advocate @ Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev  ### Support  If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat.  ### Updates  Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest  ### Feedback  If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88. #Stripe #Payments
tags: [@cjav_dev]
views: 16750
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/legacy-ach-bank-account-setup
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1EX-DrikoA
youtube_id: _1EX-DrikoA
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/_1EX-DrikoA
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/_1EX-DrikoA/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# [legacy] ACH bank account setup

*Published: February 13, 2020*
*Views: 16750*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1EX-DrikoA)

[![[legacy] ACH bank account setup](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/_1EX-DrikoA/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1EX-DrikoA)

## Description

Updated video: https://youtu.be/Q9Muz8OEZYk 

Join us for Stripe Developer Office Hours and get your questions about taking payment directly from a bank account with ACH. Our engineers will walk you through the basics of Collecting and Verifying bank account details.

## Table of contents

00:05 Intro
01:02 See what we'll build
03:12 Initialize server code
08:15 Setup client with Plaid link
13:17 Setup exchange token route
24:00 Create test charge
25:00 Manually verify bank details with microdeposits

## Resources
Official Guide - https://stripe.com/docs/ach

## Presenter
CJ Avilla, Developer Advocate @ Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev

### Support

If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat.

### Updates

Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest

### Feedback

If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88.
#Stripe #Payments

## Transcript

[Music] stripe enables you to accept ACH payments direct from a bank account so a couple things to note about ACH it's currently only supported for businesses that are based in the US and is not yet compatible with payment intents but it's something we'd love to add so if you're interested in beta testing when this becomes available or if you have feedback around those restrictions please let us know by sending us a note in the feedback form below so in today's demo we're gonna build two ways of collecting and verifying bank account numbers first we'll show you how to use Platt to set up instant collection and verification and second will show you delayed verification using micro deposits where the account details are first tokenized with stripe J s and then to small like micro deposits are made to the customers bank account and then they're brought back to your site and they have to enter in those two small amounts to verify their bank account so let's go ahead and get started I have a quick demo here to show you of what we will build so in the beginning we'll say you know connect to your account and so we'll open up this plaid link and we are in sandbox mode so there's a couple of username and password just like test username and password down here that we can use and that will bring back a list of the accounts that are available for us to connect with for that Bank so we'll pick plaid checking and continue now there's going to be an exchange where the plaid link tokens that are given back to us will be sent to our server and then securely on our server we're going to exchange those for a bank account token so we got back this beat oak which is a one-time token that we're going to use to create a customer and set that as their default source and the thing that's interesting about when you use plaid is the the bank account is immediately verified so you don't have to do the the two micro deposit step later so we have created a customer we get back the status of verified now we could create a charge on this customer and collect money from their bank account so that's method number one method number two is we're gonna collect the details the bank account details is the raw eat ales that will tokenize with stripe J s and then we get back similarly another beat oak and we're gonna use that to create a customer but this time when we create the customer the bank accounts status is in new meaning it's not yet verified and so what we need to do is have a second step here as part of manually verifying the bank account details and so we'll we'll just kind of use the query string parameter to pass forward the customer and bank account and then collect the two amounts that allow us to verify the bank account so if we entered like 22 that is not one of the test valid test micro deposit amounts so if we click verify we should get back an error that says you know the amounts don't match what we deposited but if we enter 45 which is the the second magic amount here so 32 and 45 this will then verify the bank account and similarly now we can charge this customer so that's what we're gonna build today let's jump into some code and get started so I'm gonna kill the server here and we'll start from scratch as we do for all developer office hours episodes welcome back again I'm CJ Villa developer support engineer here at stripe and excited to show you how to build this today using go and the echo the echo web framework so ACH client and let's see what else we're gonna need here we're gonna need an index manual and verify those are gonna be the files in our on our client and then we'll just use server go here as our server entry point so I'm going to fire up an echo app and we can kind of go through each of these things so we're just starting and starting to create an entry point so we can start up our server I've loaded some of the the basics here that we will use we're going to be managing some environment variables with a dot n file then we have a couple of dependencies for echo and finally I'm loading a stripe go here so let's see so this is our our main function we're just loading up the environment variables setting our striped key and then firing up an echo server which will currently just render back the index when we get the route route we're gonna add manual here and also verify okay the next thing I want to do is set up a route so that we can request our publishable keys from the backend so this is just going to be get public keys and this is going to be a public key handler which will define below okay so public key public keys okay and this is gonna look something like stripe maybe our stripe key which is a string and our plaid key which is also a string these are both of our publishable keys and we want this to be returned as part of this like public keys route so I'm gonna first say that yeah so we want to we want to set up our data as the this is going to be public keys and it is going to be stripe key is gonna come out of our environment variables get in stripe stripe public key and same thing for plaid so if you head over to plaid once you're all signed up and logged in if you go to dashboard plaid comm / overview slash sandbox on this page if you if you were to scroll down you would see the keys that are required for plaid and also some information about a Quick Start Guide and some other some other helpful things from plaid so you'll want to store your plaid three of your I think it's your plaid public key secret key and client ID in your invert in your environment variables you might also put like the environment there so you can switch it out for production when you're ready to move from the sandbox okay so we are going to just send these public keys back to the client so let's start up the server go run server and then I'm just gonna poke at it so curl expose the post for two for two public keys just to see that they're coming back and it's not a post request it's a this is just a get request and we got back nothing because we don't have our environment variables here so we'll restart the server and then try this again and we got back some keys and one of them is actually not the flat key it's the strike key so let's make this plaid ok restart the server and fantastic that's what we're looking for and that's what we're gonna retrieve from the client and I think we're ready to start start working on that index.html page so our server is up and running we can we can browse to this index.html page right now it's empty so let's add some HTML I'm just gonna throw in some CSS and our usual checkout style thing that says connect bank account and I'm also going to add like with plaid on this page so it's clear connect button oh actually that's going to be replaced with a plaid link okay so at this point what I want to do is I'm gonna go use the the code from the ACH guide in the stripe dock so if you go to stripe comm slash docks last slash ACH you will find this using plaid section and there is a snippet here that allows you to quickly drop in the plaid link integration so I'm gonna do that here and then move that plaid button up inside of my page so that it looks nice and then we will scoot these over and okay so since I'm fetching my publishable keys from the server I actually don't want to register this link handle or just yet excuse me I want to pass in the keys that are fetched from the server so what I'm going to do is say fetch public keys and then only then I'm gonna say like call this function register link Handler and I'm gonna pass in the plaid key to there okay and I'm gonna replace this key with the plaid key and I want to do that for everything including this handler down here so that this link handler is in scope where we are setting the plaid key okay one other thing I wanted to do is add just like a debug message input here or div so that we can see what's happening right on the page so I'm going to add in my little debug helper and some comments so let's see maybe we say bug fetch keys okay and all right so that's looking good right when the page loads we'll hit her back end get some get our keys and then we want to register link Handler we're gonna pass in the plaid key there that will call this function which will initialize this link handler for the plaid link integration passing in the plaid key so that should be all registered and good to go and then when that is successful that means like we've successfully gone through the steps on plaid we can say plaid link setup complete and that's going to result in this public token and some metadata with the account ID so these two things need to be passed to our back-end so what we want to do is we want to exchange this public token an account ID that we got back from plaid on our on our server for a bank account token so what I'm going to do is call a function here that will define a second so exchange or exchange tokens and we're just gonna pass public token and metadata account ID okay and then we'll just define that down here function exchange tokens and that's going to take in the public token and the account ID this will look something like the bug exchanging tokens and this will be a request to our back-end exchange tokens and we need to pass along that public token and account ID okay so we are gonna call our back-end and hit this post route exchange tokens that we haven't yet defined and we're gonna pass along the public token and account ID and if successful we should get back bank account token bank account token okay so before we go too far let's go to find that handler on the server that's gonna actually allow us to exchange these tokens so exchange tokens and this is going to be exchange token handler okay all right so it's going to look something like this exchange token grams that's going to pass us the the public token this is the public link token and it's gonna pass us the account ID this account ID is not your stripe account ID this is the ID that's you that's uh returned from the plaid link integration okay then we need then our exchange token handler change token handler and what that will do is say deserialize these exchange token params and then we need to do we need to make a call to actually do that exchange so I'm gonna refer back again to the ACH guide here on stripe and I'm going to go to the go language and this is when your when your server has the public token and the account ID you have to make two calls to plaid to exchange and get back the striped public or the the strike stripe bank account token so I'm going to copy actually all of this and then head back over here and insert okay so we are now we're going to be using the plaid go bindings and so we need to make sure that we have installed that dependency and the way that we do that is a github.com slash plaid slash plaid go slash plaid okay so that will install the plaids go bindings and now we need to make sure that we're pulling the plaid client ID and secret and public key out of our environment variables OS get and and they don't have these curly braces on them so I can remove those okay we are gonna continue in sandbox mode just for for testing and then here the exchange public token this is the public token that we just got back on the client from that exchange and this will be available in params now params dot public token and similarly this account ID here is the one that we got back in the client side also account ID so that'll be available in those clams that we just D serialized from the client and the data we want to send back is just that stripe bank account token okay so this is go Ven is yelling at me a little bit because this is a composite literal and I haven't named all of these keys but that's okay it's just that is just really a warning so we will continue driving on restart the server come back to our client I'm going to load up the index page so we can see what's going on here and it is not the verify page the index page okay so it well we have fetched the keys I'm just kind of walk through this with the debugger open so a little bigger okay so when we click on open plaid link that is going to walk through the plaid setup and on success of that setup we should enter this block then we will exchange tokens and if we successfully get those back we're just going to log out the token to the console for now so let's let's see how it goes continue pick a bank user good pass good and submit and then we pick a bank account and hit continue and now we should drop into our on success and we did so we did get back a public token we got some metadata back with the account ID so that is all looking good now we want to exchange those tokens so we'll drop into that function here again we have the public key and the account ID and we're gonna walk through this exchange token flow and then eventually end up on this success hopefully okay we ended up in success and we did get back a beat okay so that's great we can now use this to create a customer that we can then charge so what we're gonna do now is at this point on the client we're going to make a new call to our server to create a customer and we're gonna pass in just that bank account token alright so let's go back over to the code go back to the client and at that point where we got back the bank account successfully here we want to say is like well let's let's say token exchanged and then maybe like the bank account token just so that we have it in the UI and nicely there and then I'm just gonna say create customer here and pass in that bank account token which we then need down or we need to define we needed to find that function so create customer it's gonna take in the bank account token and we need to call our back-end again so fetch create customer create customer and that is just gonna take in the bank account which is bank account token okay and then so let's just add some more debugging here and created a customer so this is actually the customer we're going to get we're going to render the customer data back after we've created it on the on the server okay all right so that is looking pretty good now we need to go define this route on the server so it's going to be the create customer route okay it'll be a post request to create okay create customer params that's just going to be the bank account we could pass in other things here if we wanted okay and then the handler is going to look something like this create customer handler where we're gonna new up some params of that create customer type a customer params and they will be deserialized and we'll have this bank account token and then we need to yeah so we're gonna say cuss params and these are gonna be the params we're going to send to stripe and this is going to be striped customer programs and the way these work is we call set source it's kind of like a special argument here where we need to call set source and we're gonna pass in that bank account ID so we're gonna say params bank account so we're setting that as the source and then we want to say cuss and air is going to be customer new cuffs params so this is how we create the customer on stripe and then if the error is not null nil and go then we want to render an error back to the back to the client just so that we have that error message that we can show to the to the user otherwise we're gonna have this cuss object which has the customer data and we want to render that back to the object or to the to the client okay create customer is looking pretty good let's see customer params set the source alright great so we're deserializing that JSON sent from the client and we will have access to bank account on params we're setting that as the source and then we're creating a new customer so this this isn't really available yet because we need to import that here from stripe go they say stripe goes slash customer and then restart our server and let's go give it a whirl so we refresh the page we fetch the keys we need to go through that whole plaid flow again continue user good pass good submit pick a bank account and it really doesn't matter which one you pick I think they let you tests different amounts but for now it won't matter too much okay we we get into our debugger which was broken here and I think we're good let's just keep going and we did get in error bank account token is not defined bank account token is not defined okay cool let's see in create customer bank account token to it I must have misspelled this somewhere yes I did okay so I have a misspelling bank account token yeah bank account token there's a t here okay does that match okay all right let's see refresh open plaid let's walk through it again these are good pass good shirts a it's kind of fun you can log into any bank with those credentials here all right 100 exchanging tokens got back a beat Oh creating a customer customer created excellent so now we're at a place where we have a bank account that's been verified that's excellent we can grab this customer ID if we want and we can even say like using the stripe CLI which we can share a link with you you can say stripe charges create for this customer maybe the the amount is $100 and the currency is USD okay so we get back a charge okay we charge the customer and right now that's pending but we can sort of simulate this so it starts out in the status of pending but we can say stripe charges retrieved now stripe charge is retrieved and we need to pass it the ID of the charge and we get back succeeded fantastic so now we have a verified bank account source that was collected and immediately verified and we are able to successfully create a charge for that customer that we created with that bank account token as their default source so that completes the first part of the demo using plaid to collect and immediately verify let's head over to the second part of the demo I'm gonna go back into our code and this is going to work we're going to start from the manual collection HTML page so again we see some like demo CSS and then check out and this is going to be like collect bank details okay the first one we need is the name we need the account holders name name input Jenny the next one is that or the next two are going to be the account and routing numbers let me collect the account number and that's going to be a count input and the account number the test account number is available on that ACH page and I can show you that in a minute and there's a test routing number so similar to how there are test cards that will behave differently there are a number of different tests ACH bank account numbers you can use to this will make this a number and it's going to be the routing input and there should be seven zeros one two three four five six seven okay great and in this case we're going to use stripe js2 tokenize those bank account details so we need stripe J s and we need to initialize an object here that we can use so let's grab reference to a number of these different things so yeah the button is the submit button and the name input is but count input is input routing input is the routing input okay and then what we want to do is we want to say when that button is clicked we want to say we're tokenizing the bank details set up my little debugger here okay the bug message so we can see okay so we're gonna tokenize the bank details by calling stripe dot create token and the type of token we're creating is a bank account and there are a number of different parameters we must pass here so we want to pass the account holder name and that's gonna be the name input value and we also want to be account holder type in this case it's just going to be an individual we want to pass the currency and the country and also the account number and routing number okay that will return a promise that resolves with a response that has the token on it so we'll say then there's a function that takes in the response and when we get back that response we want to we'll say first of all we'll debug and say tokenized bank account and we'll show the that token so RESP token that ID I believe is where the V taupe will live and then we also want to create customer here with that with that ID now this create customer function is going to be the same as we implemented over here so I'm actually just gonna copy and paste it just for speed here so create customer again exact same thing we're still passing in bank account token and we should be getting back a customer object with that set as its default source okay so let's see let's just walk through this so we're we're setting up a form it's gonna have a name input and account number input a routing number input submit button and while we're going through that we'll say when the button is clicked we want to take all those details from the form and tokenize the bank account and then we want to create a customer so let's see if that works so in this case we're going to manual we've got our our fields and our form looks pretty good here we're collecting these bank account details again let's uh let's drop into the debugger here and say when we click on this let's break and then maybe when we add a success we'll break and then when we create a customer let's walk through that too just to make sure everything is looking good so I'm gonna click Submit and now we are going to pass in the account holder name and the account and routing number to create token and we should get back a token and it looks like we did get a response it does include the the bank account ID and also has that ID right here okay that's fantastic now we're gonna create a customer with that with that token so we're gonna pass in the bank account token and now we're gonna call create customer passing down that token and we're resolving with the customer response that has all the information about the customer including their ID so that is looking really good and we have created the customer fantastic but if we look if we scroll down and look under the sources for that customer well notice that the status of that bank account is still new that means it needs to be verified so because the bank account has not been verified we need another step and this is going to be the step where we collect those micro deposit amounts and as part of that collection for those micro deposits the API expects that we're passing in the ID of the customer and the ID of the bank account that we want to verify so I'm just gonna add a little helper here where we can as part of our debug message we can log out you know go to this verify path that has in the query string parameters the ID of the customer and the ID of the bank account now in practice you should be storing this stuff in your database and because likely it's going to take many days before those micro deposits hit the account and so you want the customer to be able to come back much later and verify their bank account details so for now we're going to keep it keep it simple and redirect or you know logout that we need to go over to another page here so I'll just say like debug go to verify customer and then we're gonna say the customer ID and we're gonna say in the query string this won't bank so so the bank is equal to customer default source because that's going to be set the ID of the bank account is going to be set as the default source on the customer so when we if we refresh this page and hit submit we should be let's see you can remove all these now okay confident this is gonna work created the customer ok now go to verify with the customers ID and the bank account as well head over to verify and this is the page the next page that we will build okay so verify HTML demo CSS and then set up some scaffolding again and here we're gonna say like verify Bank mmm and we'll need two fields amount and it's a number and amount input and one of the test amounts is 32 field amount 2 number 2 input and the other number the other test number is 45 I'm just going to pre-fill those and then we have that verify button and we'll have our debug message here okay so let's grab reference to those amounts and to the button and when the button is clicked we want to make a request to our back-end again to verify and we need to pass in the amounts amount I'm going to make those integers here by using percent amount input value amount to input value and I also want to pass in the customer ID and the bank account ID bank account so the these we can pull out of the query string parameters customer ID and then bank account ID so those are going to come from the part of the query string parameters and the bank can ID okay and so here we want to say like debug verifying and debug verified just print out the data if if it fails or if it of if it succeeds same if it fails I was thinking they can ahead a little bit okay so now the route that we need to implement on the back end is this verify route so we're collecting the amounts for the micro deposits when the button is clicked we are creating a post request to our back-end to slash verify and at this point what we need to do is make sure that we have an endpoint on the server that can accept these amounts customer and bank account and then verify that bank account so let's head over to the server and implement that new route it's gonna be a verify handler verify params amounts are going to be we're going to be accepting to int 64's and those are going to be in amounts in the amounts field we're gonna be accepting customer as a string customer and same with the bank bank okay so now we doin our handler verify handle there and it's gonna look like this params are gonna be that thing we just made of the shape verified params and okay so once that's deserialized and we have access to those amounts that customer in that bank account then we need to verify the source so we need to create some params for the request we're gonna make two stripe I'll call those verify params and that's gonna look something like this striped source verify params and it takes in amounts which are the same two in 64 so we should be able to say params amounts here and in this in this object we're also passing the customer which is stripe string of params customer okay next we need to make the request so we're gonna get back a bank account and maybe an error and it's gonna be payment source verify and that the first argument to verify is the ID of the bank account which is available in programs because we just deserialize that the second thing that we need to pass in are these verify params okay so if error is not equal to no then we're gonna send back that stripe error otherwise we want to render the JSON for the bank account back to the client all right so before we get too far this payment source that comes from stripe go was not imported yet so I need to add that payment source okay restart the server and let's go head over to verify and we've got the customer in the bank account that needs to be verified still in the query string parameters so let's try a number that doesn't work I'll try 22 again click verify and we are failing what is the message here debug is not defined okay that's cuz we probably didn't implement our debug function easy enough okay did bug message all right restart the server refresh the page put back in another invalid amount verifying verified the amounts provided don't match the amounts in the bank account so we got back we're either logging out verified in the wrong place or we're not actually like checking the status but that's okay because we can see the error message right here the amounts provided don't match the amounts okay what about 45 click verify and now we are successfully verified so that's great so now we have verified the bank account for this customer so I wanted to show you before we get too far if we get back if we go back to manual and create the customer again with these account details and we take that customer object we can go retrieve that customer using stripe Jess I'm sorry stripe CLI stripe customers retrieve we pass in the ID and we get back the customer so this is right after we created the customer with that bank account token that was tokenized with stripe J s and down in the sources block we see the status is new we see the status is new right there right and so that new status of the bank account is what we're trying to verify and adjust so let's let's go and verify this bank account and then go back and check and make sure that the status is verified so we enter that we say verify we'll enter the correct amounts click verify now the status shows verified there and there in the response so let's go back to our client and try to run the same request again ok stripe customers retrieve and now you see that the bank account status is verified all right similar to the previous charges create we will create a charge with our new customer which has this ID and we'll see that this similarly starts out as pending but does have all of the right information it's approved and authorized and we can retrieve that charge with this ID and see that it has succeeded ok so that's how you those are the two methods for collecting and verifying your bank account details first with plaid and then manually using stripe j/s so I hope you enjoyed this episode I hope it was informative and we really look forward to these office hours and we always were with you we always want to support you and help you grow your business so please if you liked this episode and if you want to see more of stripe developer office hours please subscribe and get notified for when the next episode comes out we have some really exciting episodes coming up with new products and new features also I want to mention that if you aren't already signing up for the Developer digest is a really great way to stay informed about new stripe api's changes to the stripe developer client libraries and also to be invited to some of the workshops that we are putting on in person or virtually so if you haven't already head over to any of really any of docks pages if you scroll the bottom there's a way for you to sign up for that newsletter again we really appreciate you joining us thanks folks we'll see you next time [Music]

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