Marqeta

Marqeta processed more than $400 billion in card payments in the four quarters up to 30 June 2026, and its platform reached an uptime of 99.99 percent in 2025. The issuing and processing core handles debit, prepaid, credit and virtual cards with spend controls, real-time decisioning and Just-in-Time Funding. Accounts, money movement and risk services run on the same platform, so a card program can hold balances and move money without a second provider.

Customers that want fewer partners hand the program management to Marqeta as well. This service covers bank relationships, network approvals and BIN sponsorship, KYC and AML checks, disputes and chargebacks, card fulfillment and cardholder support around the clock. Ramp and DoorDash are among the customers that Marqeta presents, and Ramp went from incorporation to its first card transaction in less than 70 days on the platform.

In 2025 Marqeta completed the purchase of TransactPay, an e-money institution and BIN sponsor for the UK and the European Economic Area. TransactPay is the trading name of Transact Payments Limited in Gibraltar and Transact Payments Malta Limited, which hold e-money licenses from the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission and the Malta Financial Services Authority. Both companies are principal members of Visa and Mastercard, so Marqeta can now run a European card program from the license to cardholder support without further partners.

In June 2024 Marqeta appointed Marcin Glogowski, who had led Central and Eastern Europe at PayPal, as Managing Director Europe and UK CEO in its expanded London office. In May 2026 Marqeta reported eightfold growth in the processing volume of its European card programs from 2022 to 2025. In the same announcement it extended accounts and money movement to 30 more European countries with Banking Circle, a bank licensed in Luxembourg. Card programs there can hold virtual accounts and multi-currency wallets next to the card and send money by SEPA Instant or UK Faster Payments.

Klarna already used Marqeta in the US and Asia-Pacific when the partnership spread to 13 European markets in 2021, from the UK and Germany to Poland and Norway. Marqeta powers the one-time virtual cards in the Klarna app there. In a separate project, Klarna moved nearly 3 million cards across several regions, currencies and products to the platform without downtime.

When Marqeta named its new head for Europe, it also named further customers in the region. Trade Republic issues a debit card for spending and saving to its customers in 17 markets, and the British bank OakNorth gives a commercial debit card to its business banking clients. Lydia runs its digital bank Sumeria on Marqeta, after using the platform since 2019 for its payment app in France, Belgium, Spain and Portugal.

The spend management company Moss runs its European card program with Real-Time Decisioning, 3D Secure and AI-supported dispute handling from Marqeta. Moss avoided about €100,000 in fraud losses this way and saved about the same amount in internal costs.

Three partnerships connect Marqeta cards with stablecoin balances, so that the cardholder spends the stablecoin and the merchant receives ordinary currency. With zerohash, which handles custody, compliance and liquidity for the tokens, Marqeta lets card programs fund balances in USDC or another stablecoin. In September 2026 a partnership with BVNK followed, in which BVNK moves stablecoins and fiat money while Marqeta issues the cards and holds the network relationships.

On 16 October 2026 Marqeta announced stablecoin-backed cards with Coinbase for its enterprise customers, from crypto companies to firms outside crypto. Coinbase holds the stablecoins and converts them to and from fiat money, settlement runs on Base, and Marqeta issues the cards and processes the payments. Coinbase was already a Marqeta customer before this deal, with cards that spend crypto balances.

AI agents reach the payment APIs of Marqeta through an MCP server, which builds on the open Model Context Protocol and is still in beta. An agent can issue a virtual card ready for checkout, set spend and velocity limits, review transactions and file disputes. Marqeta gives the example of an expense management agent that creates a card with a limit of $50 a day for a new employee. Card credentials of this kind for software agents are one building block of agentic payments.

On 31 March 2026 Marqeta added an AI risk score to its Real-Time Decisioning product, which rates each card payment at the moment of authorization. The model learns from transaction data of the card programs on the platform and checks more than 300 attributes per payment. Customers combine the score with their own rules to approve, decline or review a payment. Scoring each authorization with a trained model is how AI fraud detection works in card payments.

Marqeta issues and processes payment cards for other companies, which then offer these cards under their own brand. The platform approves each payment in real time, and Marqeta can also run the whole card program, from the bank relationship to cardholder support.

With Just-in-Time Funding, the card account holds no balance in advance, and Marqeta moves the money into it only while a payment is being authorized. In the managed version Marqeta decides by the spend controls alone, while in the gateway version the system of the customer approves or declines each funding request and may approve a partial amount.

Marqeta runs branded credit card programs for consumers and for businesses, with underwriting, bank partnerships, rewards and customer service from one provider. Which of these services a company can use depends on the jurisdiction, so the offer in Europe can differ from the one in the US.

Marqeta has its headquarters in Oakland, California, and runs its business in Europe from an office in London. Its European e-money institution TransactPay has its registered offices in Gibraltar and in Floriana on Malta.