Stripe has introduced a product called Stripe Issuing in Europe. This new product will enable users to create, manage, and distribute virtual and physical payment cards, giving businesses more control over how they spend their money.
Stripe issuing was launched in 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 puts businesses in complete control of how, where, and when their money is spent, 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.
The product works in tandem 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. 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.
“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’s EMEA Business Lead Matt Henderson.
Stripe Issuing already operates 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. Users such as Cornershop have leveraged Issuing to launch new business opportunities.
European businesses like Worklife and InnStyle can also make use of Stripe Issuing. Emburse Captio will use Stripe Issuing to enable Italian and Spanish businesses to provide expense payment cards to employees programmed with custom spend controls that can be configured to their specific company policies.
The launch of Stripe issuing means that Stripe’s global user base can begin issuing cards in Europe.
