Why is Stripe showing Link or a Direct Debit/bank payment option at checkout, and how do I turn it off?

A customer at checkout was offered Link (Stripe's one-click autofill/wallet) or a Direct Debit / bank account payment option, and used it to hand over their bank details — even though nobody at the shop remembers turning that on. This is expected, and it is not something BRM controls.

Short answer

BRM does not choose which payment methods Stripe offers your customers at checkout. For the standard online booking checkout (the "Stripe inline" experience used by the current online booking widget), BRM asks Stripe to decide automatically which methods to show, and Stripe makes that decision from your Stripe account's own settings — not from anything configured inside BRM. There is currently no BRM setting, checkbox, or flag that restricts this to card-only.

To stop Link or a bank/Direct Debit method appearing, you turn it off directly in your Stripe account:

1. Log in at dashboard.stripe.com.
2. Go to Settings → Payment methods.
3. Find Link in the list and turn it off.
4. Find the relevant bank/Direct Debit method for your country (e.g. Bacs Direct Debit in the UK, ACH Direct Debit in the US, SEPA Direct Debit in the EU) and turn that off too.
5. If you take payments in both Test and Live mode, check the setting in both — repeat the toggle in whichever mode you didn't just check.

Changes take effect on the next checkout session; nothing needs to change in BRM.

Why BRM can't turn this off for you

When BRM creates the payment request for an online booking, it explicitly tells Stripe to use its "automatic payment methods" feature, with no list of allowed types attached. That's a direct instruction to Stripe: "decide for yourself what to offer, based on whatever this merchant has enabled in their own Stripe account." BRM does the same thing on the zero-deposit/save-card path (a Stripe "setup intent" used to store a card with nothing charged up front) — same automatic behaviour, same lack of restriction.

On the customer-facing side, the booking widget then builds Stripe's payment form directly off whatever that payment/setup request allows — it doesn't pass any extra restriction of its own either. So the full chain, from BRM's request to Stripe through to the actual form the customer sees, has no BRM-side filter anywhere in it. Whatever your Stripe account is configured to offer is exactly what gets shown.

This also means BRM never receives or stores the customer's bank account details itself — Stripe collects and holds that the same way it does card details. BRM only finds out that a payment or setup succeeded, not the underlying account number.

If your store still uses the older "Stripe Checkout" option

A separate, older setup exists for stores that enabled Stripe Checkout (Settings → Payment Processors → Stripe → "Use checkout" toggle) rather than the default inline checkout — see the Stripe Checkout (option) article. That screen has its own list of tickable payment methods (Card, Ideal, Sofort, Bancontact, Giropay, Sepa Debit). If Sepa Debit is ticked there, that is a genuine BRM-side opt-in, and unticking it (and saving) will stop that specific Direct Debit method being offered through that flow. Link is not one of the options on that list either way — it's still governed entirely by your Stripe account settings as described above, regardless of which checkout mode you use.

What to tell the customer/operator

• No booking or account data was mishandled by BRM — the bank details went straight to Stripe, exactly as card details do.
• If they don't want to accept a payment method, it needs turning off in their own Stripe account (Settings → Payment methods), not in BRM.
• If they're unsure what's currently enabled, checking that same Stripe settings page will show them everything that's live for their account today, not just Link/Direct Debit.