How Issuing works

Learn how to start building a card programme with Stripe Issuing.

Stripe Issuing allows you to create, manage, and scale a payment card programme for your users without setup fees. You can programmatically control the details of your card programme, which includes issuing physical or virtual cards, managing spending, and approving or declining transactions.

We partner with multiple trusted banks to provide a banking as a service (BaaS) infrastructure for you to build new financial service offerings. We also partner with the Mastercard and Visa card networks so you can choose which network to issue cards on, or you can issue cards on both networks.

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 a 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 transaction 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.

Issuing use cases

Use case	Description
Commercial card programme	Create, manage, and distribute payment cards for your business.
Consumer card programmeprivate preview	Create, launch, and run a bank-sponsored credit programme for your customers with Credit Consumer Issuing.

Integration options

Treasury

You can integrate Issuing with Stripe Treasury to attach cards to open loop wallets and offer your users additional transaction options. Treasury is only available to platforms and connected accounts located in the United States. Learn how to set up a Treasury integration.

Connect

You can integrate Issuing with Stripe Connect to issue cards to users who aren’t directly employed by your business. See Set up an Issuing and Connect integration for more details.

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 shows 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. You can add funds 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. You can also pay out funds from the Issuing balance to an external bank account.

Connected accounts can also use a Stripe Treasury account to fund cards for a full BaaS solution.