Stripe’s New Card Products - CardsFTW #155
Plus, first movers from Deserve, Apple + Uber, PNC's latest, and more
Stripe Launches New Card Products
Stripe held its annual customer conference, Stripe Sessions, last week. There were a huge number of product announcements, which I am sure many other newsletters are covering. I want to focus on two announcements: consumer credit and global cards.
Stripe Consumer Revolving Cards
Readers of our Credit Card Program Management Platform Market Analysis know that Stripe’s offering to date has been limited to commercial programs. At Sessions last week, Stripe announced they will enable credit card program management for consumer revolving cards, joining a small list of providers such as Cardless, Imprint, Highnote, Tallied, and Marqeta.
In typical Stripe fashion, the best way to learn about this is via public API docs. The core offering of Stripe consumer revolving offers a pretty complete offering:
Credit Consumer Issuing offers a compliance-forward program that helps you manage a credit program with BIN sponsorship, customize how customers earn rewards, and also partner with card networks such as Visa or Mastercard.
Credit Consumer Issuing automatically:
- Issues physical and virtual cards through a bank partner to customers
- Maintains a credit ledger to track customer payments
- Approves or denies payment authorization requests in real time
- Includes advanced fraud alerts to prevent fraud
- Responds to disputes on behalf of the cardholder
- Reminds and collects payments from cardholders
- Collects outstanding debts and charges from cardholders
- Furnishes and reports to the Credit Bureau
There is a lot of detail between bullet points in the docs and the reality of payments. I think we’ll see Stripe looking much like Highnote and Deserve’s API solutions, which means no white label web or mobile apps, with a focus on accessing features through an API. Understanding the level of cardholder support (from disputes and collections to basic questions) is a key area many of our clients are looking to further understand. Anyone thinking about issuing a consumer credit card should include Stripe in their analysis from here on out.
Global Card Issuance
Global payment cards are often referred to as a dream, because it is so hard to build a compliant program issued in one jurisdiction for use elsewhere. We chased global issuance at Apto Payments for some time, without much to show for it. Stripe announced a narrow version of this, with commercial card issuance for multinational companies within a single card program. From the docs:
We support Visa’s Multinational Program and Mastercard’s Extension of Area of Use programs for enterprise issuers serving large multinational companies. Platforms can compliantly issue cards to subsidiaries of US multinational companies in over 40 countries where the US multinational is already an accountholder.
In addition, Stripe is promoting several new stablecoin features, including "borderless” stablecoin cards.
While this form of global card issuance may not be what everyone has been dreaming of, it’s a big step forward.
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PerPay Moves to Marqeta
In CardsFTW #151, I covered Intuit’s acquihire of Deserve. Since then, it’s clear that Deserve is shutting down all of its programs with third parties. The page listing them even disappeared from their website! One larger program at Deserve was PerPay, a credit builder product. Last week, Marqeta announced that they are the new program manager for PerPay. This is a significant move as it represents the first publicly announced credit card program for Marqeta.
In January 2023, Marqeta announced its $275MM acquisition of Power Finance (weird that their site is still up). Since then, we’ve all been waiting to see a public program from MQ, and here it is. It’s a good win.
Apple + Uber
Apple’s more than 12 million cardholders received an email last week letting them know they can now get a free six-month trial to Uber One (valued at $60) with their Apple Card (provided they don’t already subscribe). This is another notch in the coupon book approach to cards I recently spoke about to NerdWallet. I feel like quite a few cards provide some sort of Uber One benefit. American Express Gold cardmembers get $10 towards Uber each month, while Platinum cardholders get $15 each month (plus another $20 in December!), but no direct Uber One membership, I don’t think, although other cards have had this in the past.
Is this a nice-to-have benefit, or a sneaky way to get a bunch of Uber subscribers? Also, in sad news for me, slipped into the bottom of this email was a note that the Apple Card T-Mobile benefit will go away on July 1.
New PNC Card
PNC just launched the PNC Spend Wise Visa, another card focused on teaching financial responsibility, this time by tying a reduction in the card's interest rate (APR) to on-time payments and minimum purchases over a twelve-month period.
The no-annual-fee card also includes $25 in annual digital subscription credits for everyone's favorites (Spotify, Netflix, and/or Disney+); price-protection up to $1,000 (cue the Circuit City ad); Porch Piracy protection up to $10,000; and reimbursement up to $800 for damaged or stolen phones (all given the purchases are made on the Spend Wise card). The last two are similar to RocketCard's protection offerings, as mentioned in CardsFTW #121.
New account holders get a 0% introductory APR for 18 months on both purchases and balance transfers–something very rare in the current rate environment. After the introductory period, APRs can range as high as 30.24% (!). The aforementioned Review Period for an APR reduction only comes around once a year, so if you don't meet the $3,000 net purchases (because you returned that $50 shirt that didn't really fit), you have to wait another 12 months.
Me, Elsewhere
I don’t exclusively talk about credit cards. Sometimes, I speak about embedded finance because I get really excited about AP/AR. That’s true. Sad, but true. Hear more about that in my appearance on The Payments Strategy Show.
CardsFTW
CardsFTW, released weekly on Wednesdays, offers insights and analysis on new credit and debit card industry products for consumers and providers. CardsFTW is authored and published by Matthew Goldman and the team at Totavi, a boutique consulting firm specializing in fintech product management & marketing. We bring real operational experience that varies from the earliest days of a startup to high-growth phases and public company leadership. Visit www.totavi.com to learn more about working with us.
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