Settlement Currency

Three currencies, and only two of them are about your customer

Stripe says currency affects three aspects of a payment, and keeping them apart is most of the work.

The first is the customer's payment method currency, meaning whatever their card or bank account is denominated in. You do not control it and it does not appear in your books. It matters only because Stripe notes the customer's own bank or card issuer might charge them a foreign exchange fee when it differs from the charge currency, which is a source of complaints that has nothing to do with your configuration.

The second is the presentment currency: the currency of the charge itself. This is the number on the checkout page and the number on the customer's receipt.

The third is the settlement currency, which is about your bank rather than your customer. It is the currency your funds arrive in.

Stripe adds a fourth term that is easy to trip over because it sounds like it belongs to this set. The "integration currency" is the currency you set on a Price or PaymentIntent. It shows up in the Dashboard, and it is the currency Stripe Tax uses when recording tax liability in its reports. It is a configuration value, not a description of money movement.

Your settlement currency sets your minimum charge, not your presentment currency

This is the consequence people meet first, usually as a confusing decline on a small transaction.

Stripe enforces a minimum charge amount so its fee cannot exceed the charge, and the minimum is tied to the settlement currency rather than the currency the customer is paying in. Stripe puts it directly: the minimum "depends on the payout bank account settlement currency".

Stripe's own worked example is the clearest way to see it. If you hold GBP and USD bank accounts with GBP set as your default currency, any non-USD charges you create convert to GBP, and those charges must meet the minimum required for GBP after conversion. So a charge that clears comfortably in one presentment currency can fail against a different settlement floor, because the test is applied to the converted amount.

The published floors differ more than people expect: 0.30 GBP, 0.50 USD, 0.50 EUR, 0.50 AUD, 50 JPY, 10 MXN, 175.00 HUF. If you sell small amounts internationally, the settlement currency you picked when you opened the account is quietly setting your product's price floor.

Adding a settlement currency is a banking decision, not a setting

You do not choose a settlement currency the way you choose a display preference. It follows from the bank account you attached.

Stripe supports settlement in additional currencies in certain countries. Its instruction is concrete: if you need liquidity in additional currencies, you enable settlement in those currencies and add a bank account in the payout settings of your Dashboard. So acquiring a second settlement currency means acquiring a second bank account that can hold it.

What that changes is routing. With a single balance, every charge in another currency converts into your one default currency. With balances in more than one currency, a charge in a currency you hold routes into that balance and is not converted, while a charge in a currency you do not hold still converts into your default. Adding a currency does not convert less in general; it converts less of the specific currency you added.

That is the decision worth making deliberately. A currency that is a durable, material share of revenue is a candidate for its own balance and its own bank account. A currency you see occasionally is usually cheaper to keep converting, because the alternative is running a foreign currency bank account and the bookkeeping that comes with it.

What this does and does not explain about a payout that will not tie out

The settlement currency explains the shape of the problem. It does not, on its own, give you the numbers.

What it explains: why the amounts on your balance transactions are not the amounts your customers paid, why a payout total is not the sum of your presentment-currency sales, and why the fee figure you are reading is already a converted number rather than one you need to convert yourself.

What it does not explain is the gap itself. A cross-currency sale passes through more than one conversion at more than one moment, and the rate your accounting system used when it recorded the sale is not the rate Stripe used when the charge settled. Those rates come from different sources at different times, so they do not match, and the difference belongs in your books as an exchange gain or loss rather than as an unexplained variance.

That reconciliation, including where the difference is recognized and how to work a payout that still will not tie, is a longer subject than a definition. The multicurrency walkthrough linked below covers it end to end.