Card Issuing companies

Card Issuing Companies

Card issuing platforms provide the infrastructure, APIs, and banking partnerships necessary for businesses to launch and scale virtual and physical payment cards. This overview examines the offerings, performance metrics, and compliance features of various card issuance providers based on available sources.

Platform Capabilities and Use Cases Stripe Issuing enables businesses to create virtual and physical credit, prepaid, and expense cards using APIs, supporting use cases such as expense management, rewards programs, and digital wallet integration [1]. Lithic offers developer-friendly APIs and dashboards for programmable card issuing, multi-currency transactions, instant issuance, mobile and web provisioning, and custom card printing [4]. Apto Payments powers physical debit cards, virtual cards, corporate cards, and crypto cards while managing KYC, risk management, card design, and real-time transaction reports [5]. Galileo delivers secure and scalable APIs for digital banking and card products through solutions like its Cyberbank platform [3]. Marqeta provides embedded solutions for debit, credit, prepaid, and flexible credentials via open APIs [6]. Tandym offers a branded payments suite for enterprise retailers featuring customizable on-site messaging, accelerated checkout, and pre-filled applications that deliver decisions in seconds [8]. Highnote operates as a card issuer processor and program management platform, though its web page currently encounters a client-side exception application error [7]. Deserve operates a landing page for email sign-ups protected by reCAPTCHA and uses cookies to analyze traffic [2].

Scale, Performance, and Experience Stripe Issuing has been used to create over 275 million cards, utilizing partner banks such as Celtic Bank, Cross River Bank, Sutton Bank, and Evolve Bank & Trust [1]. Galileo brings over 20 years of experience and was named Best-in-Class for digital issuance in Javelin Strategy & Research's 2025 Digital Issuance Provider Scorecard [3]. Lithic features 99.99%+ uptime with no scheduled downtime [4]. Marqeta processed over 383,000,000,000+ in volume in 2025, achieved 99.99% platform uptime in 2025, operates in 40+ countries, brings over 10+ years of modern card issuing experience, and has experienced 80x volume growth since 2017 [6]. Clients such as Western Union launched products in less than six months using Marqeta [6], while Galileo notes businesses can launch projects in as little as three months using Cyberbank [3].

Financial Terms and Compliance Tandym reduces processing fees to less than 1 percent by avoiding expensive network rails, drives a 25 percent increase in customer lifetime value, and provides enterprise retailers with quarterly revenue-share checks from branded payment partners [8]. Stripe Issuing allows businesses to build expense management programs to spend on credit, earned funds, or stablecoin balances [1]. Lithic adheres to security and compliance standards including SOC 1 Type 1, SOC 2 Type 2, PCI DSS, and ISO 27001 [4].

What is not covered Specific pricing models, developer fee structures, and international expansion roadmaps beyond general country counts are not provided for most platforms.