Online payment processing company Stripe has today announced launching Stripe Issuing in 20 European countries including Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and the UK.
Stripe Issuing grants users the ability to create, manage and distribute virtual and physical payment cards, which allows businesses to have more control over how they spend their money. From an on-demand delivery marketplace providing couriers cards to pay for orders to a car rental company giving cards for drivers to purchase petrol, the service gives business complete control over the money spent.
Stripe’s EMEA Business Lead Matt Henderson commented:
Matt Henderson Source: LinkedIn
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.
Stripe Issuing cards can be controlled through software with dynamic spending limits, blocked merchant categories, advanced combinations of rules and real-time authorisations for each transaction. All of these actions are managed via Stripe’s Issuing API.
Stripe Issuing integrates with Stripe’s suite of products and allows users to manage card issuing programmes alongside payments, fraud prevention, analytics, invoices and recurring billing.
Businesses can design their own cards with their own branding in the Stripe Dashboard. Stripe handles card production, fulfillment and shipping. Virtual cards are created instantly, while physical cards are shipped in two business days.
Stripe Issuing already operates in the US with companies like Klarna, Ramp and Flexshopper, who have existing card-issuing programmes, already signed on to Stripe. Users such as Cornershop have taken advantage of Issuing to launch new business opportunities.
Today’s Stripe Issuing launch enables European businesses like Worklife and InnStyle to use Stripe. Moreover, Stripe’s global user base can begin issuing cards in Europe.
Emburse Captio will be one of the first to use Stripe Issuing to enable Italian and Spanish businesses to provide expense payment cards to employees set up 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 and are now bringing the functionality to their European users.
Simon Taylor Source: LinkedIn
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.
Stripe recently raised $600 million in the latest funding round at a valuation of $95 billion. Investors in its latest funding round include Allianz X, Axa, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Sequoia Capital and Ireland’s National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA).
Experienced writer and journalist, working in the global online trading sector, Steffy is the Editor of LeapRate. She has previous experience as a copywriter and has been with the company since January 2020. Steffy has a British and American Studies degree from St. Kliment Ochridski University in Sofia.
