Stripe Launches Stripe Pay for Free Instant B2B Transfers Between Stripe Profiles, in Preview
Businesses can send USD, GBP or USDC to another Stripe business by its profile handle from the Dashboard or CLI; Stripe says transfers are free, and its documentation limits the preview to eligible US and UK businesses with Treasury financial accounts.
By Daniel Osei, Journalist, Payments and Cards
Stripe has introduced Stripe Pay, a way for businesses on Stripe to send each other money by looking up the recipient's Stripe profile handle instead of entering bank details. Stripe announced it on 27 October 2026, describing the transfers as instant and free and saying the feature is available in the Dashboard and the Stripe CLI.
Stripe's CLI documentation says the feature is in preview for eligible US and UK businesses and supports same-currency transfers in USD, GBP and USDC.
How a Stripe Pay transfer works
Item — What Stripe says
Status — Preview, for eligible US and UK businesses
Currencies — USD, GBP and USDC, same currency only (no conversion)
Sender — Needs a funded Stripe Treasury financial account
Recipient — Needs a Treasury financial account or a payout-enabled bank account linked to its Stripe profile
Addressing — A Stripe profile handle (such as @recipient) or a profile network ID
Price — Free, per Stripe's announcement
Where — Dashboard and CLI
The documentation is written partly for software agents. It tells an agent to use Stripe's directory to find and verify candidate businesses when no exact handle is given, to ask the user to choose the recipient rather than guess, and to add the confirmation flag only after the user confirms the recipient, amount, currency and source account. A dry-run mode validates the flow without sending money.
A closed network inside Stripe
Stripe Pay only works between businesses that both have Stripe profiles and the right linked accounts, so for now it is a payment network inside Stripe's customer base rather than a general-purpose rail. That is its main limit and its main lever. The more Stripe users hold balances in Treasury financial accounts, the more payments between them can settle on Stripe's own ledger instead of going out over bank transfer.
The inclusion of USDC alongside dollars and sterling puts a stablecoin balance in the same B2B transfer flow as fiat, without conversion. It follows Stripe's wider stablecoin push through Bridge, its stablecoin platform, and the Tempo blockchain it incubated.
Instant B2B transfers are also something US banks and existing real-time rails already offer, so adoption depends on how many of a business's counterparties are on Stripe with eligible accounts.
What is not known yet
Stripe has not said when the preview will become generally available, which other countries or currencies may follow, whether the free pricing is permanent, or how many businesses have Stripe profiles. It has not published transfer volumes.
Sources
- Stripe on X, Introducing 'stripe pay' (27 October 2026)
- Stripe documentation, Stripe pay (CLI reference)
- Runtime Wire, Stripe launches profile-based instant transfers for business payments (27 October 2026; context)