None of our 20,000+ US customers know this happened: last month, we moved them, their payment methods, subscriptions, credits, coupons, and promotion codes off our Australian Stripe account and onto a new US one. Nobody got double-charged. Nobody lost access. No emails went out, because from their side, nothing changed.
This is what it took to make that boring outcome happen.
Why we did it
The company operates in Australia and the US, but until recently, both regions ran on a single AU Stripe account that took USD payments from US customers and settled them out as AUD. That setup cost us roughly 2% per US transaction in international card surcharges and currency conversion fees on top of the domestic AU rate, plus FX losses on settlement. It also made tax season painful and obscured per-region revenue reporting. The brief from the CEO was simple: clean financials, lower fees, no customer impact. The shape of the solution - a separate US Stripe account with all US customers migrated over - was mine to figure out.
Scope
