SAN FRANCISCO—Today Stripe unveiled Stripe Issuing, a new product that allows online businesses and platforms to create their own credit and debit cards with just a few lines of code.

For the first time, Stripe Issuing makes it possible for developers and tech-forward businesses to create new cards—physical or virtual—with a single API. Previously, this would’ve taken weeks or months, following years of work to get an issuing program up and running.

By reducing the barriers to entry, Stripe makes it possible for companies of all sizes to create and issue cards, allowing them to launch new lines of business and move money in new, innovative ways. This could include things like:

• corporate expenses (e.g., offering corporate cards for employees with dynamic spending limits)
  
• on-demand platforms (e.g., providing cards for couriers to make purchases with at specific types of stores)
  
• banking (e.g., giving debit cards to consumers)
  

Stripe Issuing allows businesses to create physical cards with customizable designs, or virtual cards that can be used instantly through mobile wallets. Businesses can programmatically assign spending controls to do things like implement approved merchant categories, spending limits, per-user bookkeeping, and other granular controls. Finally, Stripe Issuing automates operational tasks, such as handling disputes, replacing cards, and generating custom reports.

Stripe Issuing is certified directly with all major card networks as an issuing processor, which ensures reliability and rapid feature releases. It also includes support for Apple Pay and Google Pay. And Stripe Issuing is built on the core Stripe platform that processes billions of dollars of payments annually, so it integrates with the full suite of Stripe products to seamlessly handle workflows for verifications, balances, and account funding.

“Stripe Issuing fills an equally deep and broad hole in the internet’s economic infrastructure as Stripe’s original payments products did,” said Lachy Groom, head of Stripe Issuing. “Stripe Issuing provides businesses a complementary set of tools for managing, controlling, spending, and moving money. As we work to increase the GDP of the internet, we don’t just want to port offline commerce online; we want to enable brand new types of businesses that couldn’t exist without the internet, including new ways to store and use money in the physical world.”

“The opportunity to use cards in innovative new ways has largely been stifled by limited documentation and high barriers to entry,“ said Jordan McKee, Research Director at 451 Research. "With Stripe Issuing, Stripe intends to offer marketplaces and other large, technology-oriented companies a single, integrated platform for both accepting and issuing cards. Just as it was with payment acceptance, Stripe’s objective is to provide the infrastructure to remove the constraints that prevent innovation, with the goal of unleashing latent opportunities for new types of card issuers and card use cases that have yet to come into fruition.”

Stripe Issuing is available to businesses in the United States today. To request an invite, visit stripe.com/issuing.