Speed to Market for Embedded Cards
Bo Jiang, CEO of Lithic, on the power of the cards as a digital payment rail
Speed to market is the wedge that lets Lithic win embedded card use cases before card infrastructure becomes a large strategic decision. For a customer like Order, the job is not building a bank, it is getting vendor specific virtual cards, transaction webhooks, auth rules, and reconciliation into a procurement workflow fast enough that the product can ship and start handling spend. That makes implementation speed itself part of the product value.
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Order shows the concrete workflow. It creates virtual cards through Lithic for vendor payments, uses those cards to pay suppliers, then rolls the charges into one customer bill with net 30 terms. That product works because cards can be spun up in software and monitored in real time, not because Order needs a full banking stack.
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This is a real market split. All in one BaaS platforms are better when a company wants a turnkey banking product and operational help. Issuer processors like Lithic fit when payments are core, the team wants more control, or the use case is narrow and card first. Modern API driven issuers also beat older processors on developer experience and iteration speed.
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The trade off changes with scale. Ramp describes newer issuers as faster for small engineering led teams, while larger incumbents like Marqeta and Galileo bring more operational muscle, proven scale, and often better economics. So speed wins the first deal, but reliability, roadmap fit, and flexibility decide who keeps the account as volume grows.
The next phase is that speed to market expands from cards into multi rail embedded payments. As customers like Order add ACH beside cards, the winning platform will be the one that lets software companies launch the first payment workflow quickly, then layer in reconciliation, controls, and additional rails without rebuilding the product or changing partners.