Stripe Payouts as an Escrow emulation

Question

I'm trying to emulate the Escrow system using Stripe Payouts. Actually, there is no escrow in Stripe now but in this Q/A article I've received an advice to use Payouts for this case. The official documentation covers Payouts not so good. The best I found is here. The idea is to send payments to user's card. I'm building the web-application using Angular 4 and Symfony Framework 3.2. This part was server-side executed, so the PHP code is the following:

public function payToCardAction()
{
    $apiKey = $this->getParameter('stripe_secret');
    Stripe::setApiKey($apiKey);

    try{
        Payout::create(
            array(
                'amount'      => 400,
                'currency'    => 'gbp',
                'description' => 'Example payment',
                'source_type' => 'card',
                'destination' => preg_replace('/\s+/', '','4242 4242 4242 4242')
            )
        );
    }
    catch (Card $e){
        return new JsonResponse(
            array(
                'status' => 400,
                'message'=> 'Bad request'
            )
        );
    }
    return new JsonResponse(
        array(
            'status'   => 200,
            'message'  => 'Success'
        )
    );
}

I used test card (4242 4242 4242 4242) in order to send there some test money but received the following error:

No such external account: 4242424242424242

Error reference in the documentation didn't help me. How can I solve this issue?

Answer 1

You need to use Stripe Connect to accept payments on behalf of third-parties and send payouts to their bank accounts (or debit cards, in the US).

I recommend you reach out to Stripe's support at https://support.stripe.com/email to explain your business model and desired flow of funds. They will help you make sure your model is supported and advise on which APIs exactly you should use.