How to launch self branded cards with a card issuing API?
How to launch self branded cards with a card issuing API?
- Mousser R.
- 8 min read
Table of Contents
Card issuing is quickly evolving into one of the numerous fascinating areas of the payments world. There is massive potential for creation and innovation.
Whether you are fresh to card programs, or migrating from your current one, Striga offers you an easy, all-in-one card issuing API to create, issue, and manage virtual and physical cards. It works via an API with a special gateway from crypto to fiat or vice-versa, so that you can successfully deploy your “blended” crypto-native card program.
Innovators & Business Owners' Challenge:
A complex and expensive card ecosystem with more than 8 third parties involved
Today, companies need to establish multiple partnerships to run a functional card program. Instead of focusing on customer experience, innovators have to spend countless hours to handle the multiple relationships with different providers, payment clearing partners, card manufacturers, processors, and 3DS providers. It gets tedious, fast.
Complex Issuing systems and a challenging partner network
In addition to the aforementioned challenges, companies will need to manage multiple other responsibilities, including:
- Scheme reporting
- Fraud monitoring
- Treasury management
- Compliance obligations
- Unplanned downtime
Of course, on top of all of this, there’s dealing with the inescapable and sometimes unexpected schema changes and breakdowns.
Benefits: Why Striga?
A built-in platform to jumpstart your card issuing program
Striga has done the groundwork for you, so you don’t have to go searching for process integrations with different processors and providers. It could take months, if not years, and distract you from your focus of growing your user base and product.
Striga - your gateway for card issuing and management
Striga’s all-in-one solution protects you from the wastefulness of the card-issuing process and the costs of managing multiple stakeholders. By integrating Striga, you can easily manage different relationships with the aforementioned partners, creating simple and scalable protocols. The Result? A better customer experience and lower costs.
Virtual and Physical cards with a customizable design & flexible program
Striga’s card issuing platform has partnerships and integrations with issuing banks and central card networks (i.e. Visa and MasterCard). This way, it can assist you in your issuing, so you can deploy individualized virtual cards for your users in a matter of a few clicks.
Integrations include KYC providers, so that we can help you quickly verify customers identities during the onboarding process of your users in a seamless way that doesn’t hinder activation. Once that is successfully accomplished, you can give them their own cards. On top of that, you will have dedicated admin tools to manage their cards’ lifecycle: activate, specify expiration offset, suspend, terminate, handle card fulfillment, inventory, and shipping in bulk. You get the control you need.
A simplified back office with an open API
Owning a card issuing platform with open APIs allows you to design your card solution, and personalize it to your user’s needs. When your core business model expands towards brand new use cases, open APIs allow you to create those necessary features effortlessly and cheaply in terms of development costs.
Use-case: How to build an outstanding loyalty program with open API ?
Striga enables crypto companies to offer their users a competitive crypto cards program, where they can spend their crypto balance by converting to fiat currencies instants before their card’s swipe clears. Companies can adjust credit cards limits based on users’ crypto balances by managing different constraints, like types of currencies, frequency, or time of use. For example, crypto companies can offer Just-in-time funding where they can control and customize transactions in real-time. With JIT, the cards hold a 0 Eur balance until you confirm the funds.
Dynamic spending controls
By specifying spending limits, fiat/crypto amounts, and/or time of use, companies can define exactly when, where, and how cards will be operated. You can limit card authorizations and include different rules to reduce the risk of fraud, and prevent unauthorized or excess spending. This way, you will build a secure and outstanding reputation for your company.
Use-case: Allow your customers to pay in crypto without changing their spending habits
Striga enables crypto companies to offer their users a competitive crypto cards program, where they can spend their crypto balance by converting to fiat currencies instants before their card’s swipe clears. Companies can adjust credit cards limits based on users’ crypto balances by managing different constraints, like types of currencies, frequency, or time of use. For example, crypto companies can offer Just-in-time funding where they can control and customize transactions in real-time. With JIT, the cards hold a 0 Eur balance until you confirm the funds.
Access to transaction data: Manage your program from a personalized Dashboard
Answering key questions about your product and users requires processed data. With the Striga Dashboard you can get the name and cardholder information of your approved users, the cardholder’s activity, balances, declined transactions, and everything else you want to know to properly manage your card program.
Steps To Launch A Card Program:
What steps do companies must take to launch an embedded fiat-crypto card program?
Step 1: Design your self-branded cards
Craft your fully branded cards’ design. Send us your unique concepts and special packaging, or let us accompany you through the creative process. The cards will then be sent for printing and remain ready to dispatch.
Step 2: Integrate via virtual card issuing API
Plug-in using our simple online documentation and testing environment sandbox. Then, allow Striga’s virtual card issuing api to accomplish all the hard work for you.
Step 3: Cards Program Management
Start managing your card program from a web-based application. Monitor transactions, payments, and card lifecycles. Additionally, you can create your process to handle the operational part of the cards program, such as chargebacks, negative balances, and fraud monitoring.
Step 4: Test and Go live
Issue your first cards internally, or to trusted cardholders, and ask for feedback before going live. Afterwards, you can go public and launch your fully branded cards program.
How does the card program look like from your clients’ perspective?
What is the process users usually follows to get their hands on a crypto card?
Crypto retail companies are fighting to acquire and retain customers in a highly competitive market. Cards are starting to emerge as a distinctive offering, so more and more users are trying to get their hands on them.
- Account creation – Crypto App: The client opens an account in a crypto related app (exchange, wallet). There, he completes his KYC and begins investing in crypto and other digital currencies. Soon after, he will want to use his newly earned money in the real world.
- Striga joins the game – Crypto Native Banking as a Service: The client orders the card offered by the crypto app, which leverages Striga to do so. Now, the cardholder may begin spending his crypto earnings immediately.
- Spending Starts – Grocery Shop: The client swipes his card, and the store processes it just as they would any other Visa or MasterCard card.
- Just-in-Time Funding: Striga sends a gateway Just-In-Time (JIT) funding request for the crypto app to confirm the trade. The crypto app validates the transaction after confirming the customer’s crypto balance in their account (crypto-fiat exchange).
- Funds Released via the Card: The Fiat funds are released to the card upon approval, and the transaction is completed in real-time.
- Successful Card Transaction: The authorization is successful and the payment is confirmed.
Use-case 1 : Fintech
How can a card issuing fintech make crypto payments mainstream?
One of the greatest challenges for cryptocurrencies is whether owners will actively and consistently make payments with them. Striga is a card issuing fintech that brings that question to the fore by making it easier for FinTech companies to issue cryptocurrency debit cards. Striga takes all of the friction away, so users can go straight to purchasing.
FinTech companies can offer crypto rewards on debit cards
Companies can enable their users to participate in a crypto-based rewards program that allows them to earn digital assets in the same way they currently earn cashbacks. These can then be traded, invested or saved for future purchases, which can be a great way of boosting retention and engagement.
How do your users earn crypto rewards?
The cryptocurrency is converted into the user’s fiat currency of preference before being loaded to the debit card. Once loaded and ready to use, assets are processed in that specific currency. Rewards, however, are given as a specific coin depending on the debit card.
Offer your users instant and seamless spending
Using a reward program, Fintech customers can maintain as much crypto as they want, rather than exchange them. They can keep the crypto in savings and have the flexibility to spend on a transaction-by-transaction basis. This near-instant capacity to go from crypto to readily spendable fiat is what finally breaks the dilemma many hodlers face: how to hold as much bitcoin as possible without losing the real world comforts that fiat currently dominates.
Use-case 2 : Crypto wallets:
How are wallets using crypto card programs to increase the loyalty of their users?
Offer your users an easy conversion of loyalty points into tokens
One of the greatest benefits of launching a crypto cards program is allowing users to pay in the currency of their choice. Crypto rewards (cashbacks) in the cards can also be a powerful way of increasing retention and bolstering card use. For example, once the user gets accustomed to getting rewards on all of their grocery purchases, they will start considering that reward the baseline for a card program, and have a hard time going back to other companies. Every time the client spends with a crypto rewards card, this incentive will be reinforced, creating a positive loop.
In brief, through the crypto card, there are multiple options akin to giving crypto rewards that can have a positive and reinforced effect on engagement and retention, increasing a sustainable source of revenue and keeping a company’s user base content in the long term.
*Striga Technology OÜ is currently pursuing a Virtual Asset Service Provider License in Estonia in accordance with the recently (March 2022) introduced amendments to the Estonian law.
Closing thoughts
Design, Issue and Manage your embedded crypto cards under one single platform
Cryptocurrencies may well reshape the future of finance. Still, the sector encounters unique challenges, not least finding a crypto native platform that understands the demands of the industry and offers the scalable crypto infrastructure that is so urgently needed.
Striga’s card issuing fintech helps companies launch products that combine financial and crypto infrastructures in as little as a few weeks. As if that weren’t enough, Striga’s expertise allows it to do all of it orders of magnitude cheaper than what the industry leaders are charging due to their old-fashioned approaches
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