Stripe Launches Issuing Service In 20 European Countries

The payments processing service Stripe has launched its Stripe Issuing service in 20 European countries, the FinTech startup announced on Monday (April 19).

Available in Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and the U.K., Stripe Issuing lets users “create, manage and distribute virtual and physical payment cards, giving businesses more control over how they spend their money,” Stripe said in a news release.

The company asserts that this program is a change from the “opaque” process of issuing credit cards in Europe. “It used to take months to create and ship new cards in Europe. With Stripe Issuing, it now takes two days,” Stripe EMEA Business Lead Matt Henderson said in the release. “We’ve been astonished by the breadth of use cases businesses in the U.S. have found for our Issuing infrastructure, and can’t wait to see what our European users build with it.”

Stripe noted that the program already exists in the U.S. at a “significant scale,” powering billions of dollars in payments for millions of cardholders and thousands of businesses in its initial year.

“Cards created using Stripe Issuing can be controlled programmatically, with dynamic spending limits, blocked merchant categories, advanced combinations of rules and even real-time authorizations for each transaction, all managed via Stripe’s Issuing API,” the company stated.

It integrates with Stripe’s existing suite, enabling users to manage card issuing programs as well as payments, analytics, invoices, fraud prevention and billing.

Launched in 2010 by brothers Patrick and John Collison, Stripe’s digital payment solutions compete with PayPal, Adyen and Square, with more than 200,000 people signing on since the pandemic began last year. The company’s March funding round put its value at $95 billion, making it one of the world’s most valuable FinTechs. The company launched in North Africa and the Middle East earlier this month.