How Issuing works

Learn how to start building your commercial card program.

Stripe Issuing is part of Stripe’s banking-as-a-service APIs that allows you to create, manage, and scale a commercial card program for your users without setup fees. You can get started quickly and programmatically control every detail of your program, from card design to approving transactions in real time. Many users build Stripe Issuing in conjunction with Stripe Treasury to attach cards to open loop wallets to offer their users additional money movement functionalities.

Contact sales to start the process and determine your eligibility to use Issuing. If you’re interested in using Treasury with your Issuing integration, fill out the Treasury form instead.

Issuing is currently available in the US, UK, and many European Economic Area (EEA) countries. Cards can be provided to individuals who reside in the same country where business is established. If your business is established in Europe, you can provide cards to individuals residing in EEA countries (this doesn’t include the UK). Read more about global issuing and see a full list of supported countries.

A common use case for Issuing is spend management, which enables customers to store funds on your platform and manage spending with branded cards.

Building blocks for financial offerings

Stripe Issuing provides the tools and components needed to build a full-featured financial offering for your customers.

Identity verification
- Reduce risk
- Perform KYC checks
- Run sanctions screening

We’ve partnered with multiple trusted banks to provide the banking-as-a-service infrastructure for you to build new financial service offerings.

We also partner with both Mastercard and Visa card networks so you can choose the network on which you want to issue cards. You can also issue cards on both networks.

Issuing architecture

With Stripe Connect, you onboard customers to your platform with connected accounts. For each of these connected accounts, you can create accountholders and provide cards to authorized users. The following diagram demonstrates a platform with a Stripe Issuing integration using an Issuing balance and a Treasury balance:

Connected accounts

Issuing only supports connected accounts that don’t use a Stripe-hosted Dashboard, and where your platform is responsible for requirements collection and loss liability, also known as a Custom connected account. Learn how to create connected accounts that work with Issuing.

Issuing balance

An Issuing balance is a funding source attached to a connected account that provides the funds for spending with the associated card account. Funds can be added to the connected account’s Issuing balance either by transferring from the connected account’s Stripe account balance, or through a top up from an external bank account. Funds can also be paid out from the Issuing balance to an external bank account.

Connected accounts can also use a Stripe Treasury account to fund cards for a full banking-as-a-service solution.