Disbursement platforms have gained significant market share in the US which has made at least 14 prepaid platform suppliers to pivot to support this market. The Stripe platform has capabilities similar to these US platforms, including support for issuance of virtual and physical cards that have a wide range of RAN (Restricted Authorization Networks) capabilities.
These RAN features include dynamic spending limits, blocked merchant categories, advanced combinations of rules, and real-time authorizations for each transaction. This issuing platform is available in Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and the UK:
“Businesses can design their own branded cards in the Stripe Dashboard, with Stripe handling card production, fulfilment, and shipping. Virtual cards can be created instantly, and physical cards are shipped in just two business days.
Stripe Issuing already operates at significant scale in the US, powering billions of dollars of payments in its first year, for thousands of businesses and millions of cardholders. Companies like Klarna, Ramp, and Flexshopper, who have existing card-issuing programmes, have signed on to Stripe, and users such as Cornershop have taken advantage of Issuing to launch new business opportunities.
As well as enabling European businesses like Worklife and InnStyle to use Stripe Issuing, today’s launch also means Stripe’s global user base can begin issuing cards in Europe.
Emburse Captio will use Stripe Issuing to enable Italian and Spanish businesses to provide expense payment cards to employees programmed with custom spend controls that can be configured to their specific company policies. The business travel and spend management company TripActions uses Issuing in the US to help businesses gain more visibility and control of their expenses and are now bringing the same functionality to their European users.
Simon Taylor, co-founder of the financial consultancy firm 11:FS said: ‘The ability for any business to issue cards to suit its needs is a significant unlock for businesses who want to create and manage their own way of making payments. Everything from creating cards that can only be used for fuel by drivers, to expenses cards inside an e-commerce platform, can be built using simple and easy-to-use tools. By embedding card issuing tools in the Stripe Dashboard and with its infrastructure first approach, these capabilities just became available to Stripe’s already large European customer base. I’m interested to see what Stripe’s customer base will do with these tools.’ ”
Overview by Tim Sloane, VP, Payments Innovation at Mercator Advisory Group
