How Issuing works

Learn how to start building your commercial card programme.

Stripe Issuing allows you to create, manage, and scale a commercial card programme for your users without setup fees. You can programmatically control every detail of your programme, from card design to approving transactions in real time. A common use case for Issuing is spend management, which enables customers to store funds on your platform and manage spending with branded cards.

You can also use Issuing in conjunction with Stripe Treasury to offer your customers additional transaction options.

Regional considerations

Issuing is available in the US, UK, and many European Economic Area (EEA) countries. In the US, you can provide cards to individuals who live in the same country where the business is established. If your business is established in the EU or the UK, you can provide cards to individuals who live in EEA countries and the UK.

To learn more and see a full list of supported countries, see Globally integrate Issuing.

Get started with Issuing

Complete the following steps to set up your commercial card programme with Issuing:

Determine your eligibility to use Issuing by contacting Stripe sales.
- If you want to use Treasury with your Issuing integration, fill out the Treasury form instead.
Choose whether to offer virtual or physical cards. Learn more about Issuing card types.
Customise your card programme, including choosing a network and a card product type. Learn how to customise your card programme.
To enable card spend, you need to fund an Issuing balance. Learn how to add funds to your card programme.
Take steps to identify and limit transactions fraud. Learn more about managing fraud with Stripe controls and tools.
(Optional) Set up spending controls, including spending limits and blocking specific business categories, countries, or business IDs. Learn more about setting spending controls.
Simulate purchases in a sandbox environment to test your integration. Learn more about testing Issuing.

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 account holders and provide cards to authorised 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.