Stripe Issuing has launched in the UK to enable users to create, manage, and distribute virtual and physical payment cards, giving businesses more control over how they spend their money.
Whether it be an on-demand delivery marketplace giving couriers cards to pay for orders, or a car rental company providing cards for drivers to purchase petrol, Stripe Issuing puts businesses in complete control of how, where, and when their money is spent. If you need to give employees budgetary power with control and spending limits then this might be the solution for you.
“Creating and distributing new cards in Europe has long been so complex and opaque that only a handful of companies could ever justify doing it. Today, we’re making it fast, simple, and secure. It used to take months to create and ship new cards in Europe. With Stripe Issuing, it now takes two days. We’ve been astonished by the breadth of use cases businesses in the US have found for our Issuing infrastructure, and can’t wait to see what our European users build with it.”
– Matt Henderson, EMEA Business Lead, Stripe
Cards created on Stripe Issuing can be programmatically controlled, with dynamic spending limits, blocked merchant categories, advanced combinations of rules, and even real-time authorisations for each transaction, all managed via Stripe’s Issuing API.
Stripe Issuing integrates seamlessly with Stripe’s broad suite of products so that users can manage card issuing programmes right alongside payments, fraud prevention, analytics, invoices, and recurring billing.
Businesses can design their own branded cards in the Stripe Dashboard, with Stripe handling card production, fulfillment, 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.
Stripe Issuing is also now available across Europe in: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain.