• Stripe Issuing is now available in 20 countries across Europe
• Businesses in Europe can design, create, ship, and manage cards
• Stripe Issuing processed billions of dollars in its first year in the US for thousands of users and millions of cardholders

Stripe launched Stripe Issuing in Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and the UK. 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.

Stripe’s EMEA Business Lead Matt Henderson said: “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.”

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.

Stripe Issuing integrates seamlessly with Stripe’s broad suite of products so that users can manage card issuing programmes right alongside payments, fraud prevention, analytics, invoices, and recurring billing.

Businesses can design their own branded cards in the Stripe Dashboard, with Stripe handling card production, fulfillment, and shipping. Virtual cards can be created instantly, and physical cards are shipped in just two business days.

Stripe Issuing already operates at significant scale in the US, powering billions of dollars of payments in its first year, for thousands of businesses and millions of cardholders. Companies like Klarna, Ramp, and Flexshopper, who have existing card-issuing programmes, have signed on to Stripe, and users such as Cornershop have taken advantage of Issuing to launch new business opportunities.

As well as enabling European businesses like Worklife and InnStyle to use Stripe Issuing, today’s launch also means Stripe’s global user base can begin issuing cards in Europe.

Emburse Captio will use Stripe Issuing to enable Italian and Spanish businesses to provide expense payment cards to employees programmed with custom spend controls that can be configured to their specific company policies. The business travel and spend management company TripActions uses Issuing in the US to help businesses gain more visibility and control of their expenses and are now bringing the same functionality to their European users.

Simon Taylor, co-founder of the financial consultancy firm 11:FS said: “The ability for any business to issue cards to suit its needs is a significant unlock for businesses who want to create and manage their own way of making payments. Everything from creating cards that can only be used for fuel by drivers, to expenses cards inside an e-commerce platform, can be built using simple and easy-to-use tools. By embedding card issuing tools in the Stripe Dashboard and with its infrastructure first approach, these capabilities just became available to Stripe’s already large European customer base. I’m interested to see what Stripe’s customer base will do with these tools.“