Programmable Cards Enabling New Businesses
Charles Birnbaum, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, on the five waves of fintech
This points to Lithic moving beyond selling card APIs into expanding the set of businesses that can exist at all. The important shift is that cards stop being just a banking feature and become programmable money inside software. A startup can issue a virtual card for a claim payout, a procurement workflow, or a supplier payment in real time, then make money from interchange while improving the user experience. That creates new products, not just cheaper infrastructure.
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Lithic came out of Privacy.com, where the team had already rebuilt card issuing infrastructure for its own consumer product. That gave Lithic a live in house customer, a steady stream of edge cases, and a platform tested across millions of cards and billions of dollars of payments before many B2B customers arrived.
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The new business creation shows up most clearly in workflows that were awkward on checks or ACH. Insurance carriers can send claim funds on a virtual card, procurement software can generate supplier specific cards inside the buying flow, and fintechs like Mercury and Novo can build differentiated banking products on top of the same primitive.
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This is the core difference versus all in one BaaS. Turnkey platforms help companies launch fast with a prebuilt template. Lithic fits when payments are central to the product and the company wants direct control over spend rules, reconciliation, card design, bank relationships, and how money moves through the app.
Going forward, the winners in card infrastructure will be the platforms that turn issuing into a software building block for vertical SaaS and B2B payments. As more companies hide the rail and focus on the workflow, the card becomes embedded deeper in the product, which gives Lithic more ways to grow from issuing into the broader stack around reconciliation and money movement.