Shift to Programmable Card Issuing
Ross Fubini, Managing Partner at XYZ Capital, on the biggest opportunities in fintech today
The center of gravity in card issuing is moving from generic card programs to infrastructure that lets enterprises treat every transaction like programmable software. What enterprises want now is not just to turn on a card, but to inspect line item level purchase data, set approval logic, tie transactions into ERP and expense workflows, and choose the right rail for each payment flow. That is why newer issuers are winning with narrower, lower level building blocks instead of broad packaged banking stacks.
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Marqeta opened the market by making modern issuing usable for fintechs like Cash App, Klarna, and Ramp. The next wave is pushing deeper into customization. Enterprises increasingly care less about a standard card program and more about whether the issuer can support their exact approval logic, funding model, bank setup, and network mix.
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Highnote is built around three pieces that matter once a program gets more complex, issuer processing, program management, and a real ledger. In practice, that means customers can track more of the transaction lifecycle in one system, reconcile faster, and avoid stitching together a processor, middleware, and separate ledger as volume grows.
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The AtoB style fuel card example shows why this matters. A fleet or vertical software company wants a card that only works for approved merchants, products, times, or drivers, then feeds that data into routing, budgeting, and fraud systems. The card is becoming an embedded control surface inside industry specific software.
Going forward, the winners in issuing will look less like simple card processors and more like programmable payments infrastructure. As more enterprises want cards, ACH, and other payment rails to plug into the same approval and accounting logic, purpose built issuers should keep taking share from legacy processors and from broader BaaS bundles that are too rigid for these workflows.