U.S.-based fintech Stripe announced on Monday it is launching Stripe Issuing in Europe. The feature will be available in 20 countries across the continent, including Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and the UK.
According to Stripe, Stripe Issuing enables users to create, manage, and distribute virtual and physical payment cards, giving businesses more control over how they spend their money.
“Whether it be an on-demand delivery marketplace giving couriers cards to pay for orders, or a car rental company providing cards for drivers to purchase petrol, Stripe Issuing puts businesses in complete control of how, where, and when their money is spent.”
While sharing details about the feature’s expansion, Stripe’s EMEA Business Lead Matt Henderson, stated:
“Creating and distributing new cards in Europe has long been so complex and opaque that only a handful of companies could ever justify doing it. Today, we’re making it fast, simple, and secure. It used to take months to create and ship new cards in Europe. With Stripe Issuing, it now takes two days. We’ve been astonished by the breadth of use cases businesses in the US have found for our Issuing infrastructure, and can’t wait to see what our European users build with it.”
Stripe then added that cards created on Stripe Issuing can be programmatically controlled, with dynamic spending limits, blocked merchant categories, advanced combinations of rules, and even real-time authorisations for each transaction, all managed via Stripe’s Issuing API.
Founded in 2010, Stripe is a technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet. Businesses of every size, from new startups to public companies like Salesforce and Facebook, use the company’s software to accept online payments and run technically sophisticated financial operations in more than 100 countries.