Marqeta

Marqeta is a card issuing and processing platform founded in 2010 by Jason Gardner and headquartered in Oakland, California. It listed on Nasdaq under the ticker MQ in June 2021. The company addresses a constraint faced by banks and fintechs whose legacy issuer processors cannot support programmable spend rules, instant virtual card creation or API-level control of authorisations.

The platform issues debit, credit, prepaid and tokenised cards through open APIs and webhooks. Just-in-Time Funding lets the issuer approve or decline each authorisation in real time and fund it at that moment; dynamic spend controls restrict transactions by merchant, category, amount and time; RiskControl handles fraud screening; the DiVA API exposes transaction analytics. Tokenisation supports provisioning into Apple Pay and Google Pay. Customers include Square, Affirm and Western Union. Marqeta reported USD 400 billion of processed volume in 2025, operations in more than 40 countries and 99.99% platform uptime, and in December 2025 agreed to acquire Transact Payments Limited to add European BIN sponsorship.

1. Just-in-Time Funding: the issuer receives each authorisation as an API call and decides and funds it in real time.

2. Dynamic spend controls: rules by merchant, MCC, amount, geography and time applied per card or per cardholder.

3. Tokenisation: provisioning of issued cards into Apple Pay and Google Pay, plus virtual card creation via API.

4. RiskControl: fraud monitoring and rule management built into the issuing stack rather than bought separately.

5. DiVA API and reporting: transaction-level analytics on authorisations, declines, settlement and programme performance.

6. Scale: USD 400 billion processed in 2025, 40+ countries, 99.99% uptime; PCI-compliant hosted widgets for PIN and card data.