American Express, Cross River Team on Issuing Cards for FinTechs

Embedded financial solutions provider Cross River Bank and American Express have begun a collaboration that allows Cross River to issue credit cards on behalf of FinTechs on American Express’ network.

With this collaboration, FinTechs can get a seamless experience when issuing with Cross River and can access select benefits from American Express, the companies said Monday (Oct. 24) in a press release.

“Collaborating with American Express enables Cross River to provide additional optionality for our partners and their consumers,” Cross River Founder, President and CEO Gilles Gade said in the release. “Our expanded payments and technology infrastructure increases efficiency and the scalability that our partners have come to expect.”

Cross River’s platform provides access to international payment rails, core infrastructure and a compliance framework, while its application programming interface (API) solutions give partners flexibility to manage costs, efficiency and latency, according to the release.

With these solutions, Cross River’s partners can integrate advanced payment solutions better and faster, the release stated.

“With Cross River, we can offer more ways for FinTechs to launch payment solutions on the American Express network,” William Stredwick, senior vice president and general manager of global network services North America at American Express, said in the release. “We selected Cross River for their full suite of products and services, and we look forward to working with them to help FinTechs innovate on our network.”

Businesses are looking to innovate their payment processes but are facing an array of challenges, Cross River Bank Head of Payments Keith Vander Leest told PYMNTS in an interview posted in June.

Read more: Cross River Bank on How Embedded Finance Can Accelerate Payments in Niche Markets

A key challenge is managing payment flow in a know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) compliant manner, finding a technology provider that can handle customer information correctly and guarantee it is not used for money laundering, Vander Leest said.