Marqeta: A Card and Payment Platform That Helps Financial Brands Launch Digital Banking Solutions

In a Nutshell: Modern card issuing platform Marqeta has helped power the digital transformation in payments since 2010. Today, its solutions allow new and established companies to innovate and compete for market share. Marqeta’s flexible platform helps institutions quickly deploy advanced card products, including contactless virtual cards, and fosters their evolution as consumer needs change.

Modern financial brands and fintech companies rely on innovation to keep up with consumer needs. Those firms need to create, differentiate, and change to stay relevant and scale in today’s financial marketplace. B2B businesses also need the flexibility to scale while serving a variety of customers.

Marqeta provides the modern card issuing and payment tools that those brands need to stay ahead.

The company’s cloud infrastructure securely and reliably supports comprehensive payment solutions, including virtual credit, debit, and prepaid cards. The Marqeta platform integrates payment processing services that fuel entrepreneurship, on-demand businesses, and many other verticals incorporating payments.

The entire Marqeta ecosystem runs in an open API environment and can also be managed from an integrated dashboard. That means brands can integrate existing accounting and ordering systems to customize products and services and gain actionable insights.

Customers, including DoorDash and Instacart, rely on Marqeta to make their multilayered business models viable. And businesses that use Marqeta gain flexibility and efficiency to meet and exceed customer expectations in a dynamic marketplace.

“When DoorDash or Instacart drivers pick up delivery orders at restaurants, they need a quick and secure way to pay those businesses,” said Veena Bontu, Principal Product Marketing Manager at Marqeta. “The virtual cards we provide for those companies enable them to roll out a payment experience that is much less prone to fraud due to card controls that can be fine tuned on our platform.”

And in the full-service banking space, which large institutions have traditionally dominated, Marqeta helps agile fintech firms innovate card features — including new reward structures. That is why banks like Marcus by Goldman Sachs choose to work with Marqeta to stay ahead of the curve.

“Because our platform is API first, it empowers our customers to enhance their value propositions as consumer needs change,” Bontu said.

The Marqeta platform supports physical credit, debit, and prepaid card products. But it’s the rise of the contactless virtual card space fueling the success of gig network companies — including DoorDash and Instacart — that has proven a particularly timely innovation as payment needs changed quickly during the pandemic.

“Drivers and gig workers need to start work immediately, and these companies can instantly issue virtual cards to their drivers’ phones so they can start their jobs instead of having to wait for a card to arrive in the mail,” Bontu said.

The cards are tokenized and provisioned to digital wallets, including Apple Pay and Google Pay, and Marqeta’s first-to-market technology also appeals to traditional banks.

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“JP Morgan Chase is a great example. We’re powering tokenized cards and digital wallet enablement for them, and they chose to work with us because we could get them to market quickly,” Bontu said.

The Importance of User Experience

“Our program management expertise enables our clients, who may not be experts in payments and card networks, to focus on the innovative consumer and business experiences they’re building,” Bontu said.

Through Marqeta, card management becomes simple. For example, businesses can instantly customize spending limits for individual employees. Fintechs looking to differentiate can use the platform to introduce new rewards programs and other innovations to the marketplace.

“On the credit side, there are flexible APIs for you to design any rewards structure you want,” Bontu said. “Whether it’s cashback categories, crypto-based rewards, or investing in stocks as a reward system, you can design your rewards structures and use our APIs to easily implement and update the customer experience.”

“You can limit spending down to the dollar, so if someone’s trying to use their card for purposes outside of the limits, our platform can catch that,” Bontu said.

Another security feature is Just-in-Time (JIT) Funding, through which card accounts maintain a zero balance until a transaction occurs. Based on the rules they establish, Marqeta customers can also approve transactions and release funds for payment. For faster reconciliations, the platform allows customers to insert metadata into each transaction.

Marqeta is also working with card networks to implement 3D Secure, a protocol for authenticating cardholders during online transactions. “Mareta provides a seamless way for our customers to integrate 3D Secure into their current cardholder experience and help ensure it’s the right person paying for that online transaction,” Bontu said.

The COVID-19 pandemic spurred mainstream consumers to embrace virtual cards and contactless payments with unprecedented enthusiasm. Even after the pandemic ends, new norms established in the financial services space show every sign of continuing.

“When banks can push cards directly to digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay through Marqeta, customers don’t have to touch a potentially contaminated point of sale device,” Bontu said. “And contactless payments have been helping keep gig workers safe when they’re going to pick up orders.”

In its continuing effort to stay ahead of innovation, Marqeta customer success professionals work with clients to elicit feedback that directly influences product development.

“Because we also serve our customers’ customers, we constantly survey what the latest needs are for consumers and businesses to ensure we understand the next trends in payments.”

That’s leading Marqeta into the emerging buy now, pay later space, where firms including Affirm and Klarna work with the company on installment payments.

“When a consumer applies for a loan through Affirm or Klarna, the merchant still needs to be paid up front, and we power a seamless and fast payment experience through the use of virtual cards,” Bontu said.

What attracts these different segments to Marqeta is that its infrastructure doesn’t get in the way. Marqeta provides resources that financial companies need to construct their own success.

“We like to say that we give you the platform, and the support, you design the new value propositions to bring to market,” Bontu said.