Global payment processing company Stripe announced on Monday that it has launched its Issuing Services in 20 countries in Europe. In a statement, the company said that its platform allows users to “create, manage, and distribute virtual and physical payment cards, giving businesses more control over how they spend their money”
Stripe has its headquarters in San Francisco, California and Dublin, Ireland. It is an Irish-American financial service and software as a service (SaaS). It was founded by brothers Patrick and John Collison in 2010. The company is valued at $95 billion and is one of the most valued fintech companies in the world.
The company’s issuing service is now available in Australia, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuanai, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and the UK.
As part of the company’s statement, the company’s EMEA Business Lead, Matt Henderson said that “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 U.S. have found for our issuing infrastructure, and can’t wait to see what our European users build with it”. This statement therefore means that its issuing service will bring about massive changes in the processes involved in card issuance in Europe.
Stripe’s issuing service exists in the U.S. at a significant level and is the fuel for billions of dollars in payments for millions of cardholders and many businesses in the country.
Stripe mentioned that “cards created using Stripe issuing can be controlled programmatically, with dynamic spending limits, blocked merchant categories, advanced combinations of rules and even real-time authorizations for each transaction, all managed via Stripe’s Issuing API”
Stripe also launched in North Africa and the Middle East earlier this month.
