For a decade, card issuing platforms sold one thing: a fast way for a business to put a Visa or Mastercard logo on a piece of plastic or a mobile wallet screen. Somebody else, usually a bank or a payments network, still had to move the money. That division of labor is now breaking down. Marqeta, one of the largest independent card issuers, has folded pan-European payment rails directly into its issuing platform through an expanded partnership with Banking Circle, and the deal is a marker of a broader shift: issuing and money movement are consolidating into a single layer, and platforms that only do one or the other are losing ground.
What Marqeta and Banking Circle actually did
Marqeta said its collaboration with Banking Circle now covers 30 additional European countries, adding multi-currency virtual accounts and domestic and cross-border payment rails, including UK Faster Payments and SEPA Credit and SEPA Instant connectivity across more than 40 member countries, to its existing card issuing business. Businesses running card programs on Marqeta can now also hold embedded virtual accounts and move money across those rails without stitching together a second banking partner themselves.
“Europe represents one of our most important growth markets, and bringing these tools to multinational and regional businesses enables them to build the innovative payment experiences that are crucial to their success,” said Anthony Peculic, interim chief product officer at Marqeta. Banking Circle, which supplies the regulated banking rails underneath the expansion, framed its role in similar terms. “Our role is to provide the regulated banking and payment infrastructure that enables partners to scale confidently across Europe,” said Mikkel Gronlykke, president of Banking Circle.
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The expansion builds on regional momentum Marqeta has already built up: the company says its European card programs grew total processing volume eightfold between 2022 and 2025, helped along by its 2025 acquisition of TransactPay, and it processed close to $400 billion in total payment volume globally last year across more than 40 countries.
Why issuers are absorbing the rails instead of renting them
The old model, issuing on one platform and settling through a separate correspondent or acquiring bank, made sense when card programs were domestic and low volume. It stops making sense once a fintech’s customers are transacting across a dozen currencies and expect near-instant settlement in each one. Every extra banking relationship in that chain adds latency, reconciliation work and a partner who can unilaterally change pricing or drop the account. Folding the rail into the issuing platform removes a layer of intermediation that businesses running international card programs had simply learned to tolerate.
It also changes who a fintech has to negotiate with. A business that wanted multi-currency accounts, UK Faster Payments access and SEPA Instant connectivity in the old model needed separate agreements with an acquirer, a correspondent bank and often a local e-money institution in each market. Marqeta and Banking Circle are betting that businesses will pay a premium to get all of that from one contract and one ledger, rather than assembling it themselves market by market.
The mechanics matter here. An embedded virtual account is not simply a number on a statement; it lets a business hold a real balance in a given currency, receive funds into it directly and pay out from it over local rails, rather than converting everything back to a home currency at each hop. Layering UK Faster Payments and SEPA Instant onto that account means a business can move money in minutes instead of days in the markets that matter most to a European card program. Without that layer, a card issuer’s customers were left holding settled funds in a single ledger currency and sourcing their own local payout rails separately, which is exactly the extra step this expansion removes.
What it means for the finance leader
For a CFO or head of payments evaluating card program infrastructure, the practical question is no longer just “which issuer has the best interchange economics.” It is whether the issuer can also settle and hold funds across every market the business actually operates in, without a second vendor relationship. A program that looks cheaper on a per-transaction basis but still requires a separate correspondent banking relationship for European settlement may cost more in operational overhead than a bundled platform charges in fees. Finance leaders sourcing or renewing card issuing contracts this year should be asking issuers directly which currencies and rails are natively supported versus which still require a third-party banking partner bolted on afterward.
The shift also raises concentration risk that is worth naming rather than ignoring: a business that consolidates issuing, accounts and rails onto one platform is more exposed if that platform has an outage, a compliance freeze or a pricing change, precisely because there is no longer a second vendor to fail over to. Bundled convenience and single-point-of-failure risk are the same decision, and finance teams should treat the trade-off as a live one rather than settle it by default. It is the same trade-off already playing out one layer up the stack, where payments infrastructure providers are absorbing adjacent capabilities rather than partnering them out.
What to watch next
Marqeta is not alone in moving this direction, and the direction itself is the story: expect competing card issuing platforms to announce their own native rail integrations in the coming months rather than continuing to lean on white-labeled banking partners. The near-term signal to track is whether Marqeta’s own disclosed processing volume in European markets accelerates following this expansion, which would confirm that bundling issuing with rails is winning business away from platforms that still require a separate settlement partner. Businesses currently mid-negotiation on a card program should ask prospective issuers to specify, in writing, which of the rails now standard at Marqeta they can match natively today.
The eightfold processing-volume growth Marqeta reports in Europe since 2022 predates this specific expansion, which means the real test is still ahead: whether adding native rails on top of an already-growing card business accelerates that curve further or simply keeps pace with it. A flattening growth rate over the next two quarters would suggest the market has already priced in the convenience of bundled rails; continued acceleration would confirm that unbundled issuing platforms are genuinely losing deals to integrated ones, not just losing a marketing argument. The same test applies to prepaid and card-based platforms already expanding into full banking services: if bundling wins, expect more of them to follow Marqeta’s move rather than continue partnering out settlement.
Source: Banking Circle
