The time is now for Marqeta

Marqeta’s growth during the past seven years has established us as innovators in payments issuance, a fundamental part of the financial value chain with trillions of dollars of business and consumer payments issued annually. We’ve focused on completely re-engineering and modernizing how plastic, virtual and tokenized cards can be developed and deployed.

For years, developers have pushed all sorts of industries to ‘get modern’, and payments is no exception. But the vast amount of our industry’s innovation has taken place on the acquiring or merchant side of the payments ecosystem. Marqeta has focused its attention on the issuing side, fundamentally rebuilding the infrastructure required to issue payment cards, and bringing that technology to developers right as the market for “new issuing” was getting started.

Developers at a wide range of companies can now use our platform to get cards issued across a variety of use cases and needs. More importantly, they can do so with the ease and simplicity they’ve come to expect from modern businesses, but now applied to the complex world of card issuing. Think of it as a kind of democratization for building card products.

I believe the other key ingredient is our partnership mindset. While the majority of our users are software developers, our customers include business people, product managers, treasurers, marketers and founders. In other words, a broader group of real people with real needs. We see the people behind the code and strive to inspire and accelerate the new possibilities that matter most to them. This mindset may start with our market facing teams, but we work hard to extend it throughout our organization, which make Marqeta an extraordinary place to work.

The number of customers leveraging the Marqeta platform continues to expand, as does transaction volume. We’ve effectively scaled our delivery capability domestically and are soon headed abroad in a big way. We believe the world deserves a modern payments platform and we’re working hard to bring it to everyone, everywhere.

It’s rare when product market fit happens as symbiotically as this, and it’s been an extraordinary journey to see it all come together. We’ve learned a ton from our customers and in turn have built a product development machine that churns out new features and capabilities on a monthly basis to serve those customers’ needs. This is the challenge and opportunity we spend most of our time thinking about and pushing ourselves to improve on every day.

If I look back on the past year, since Money 20/20 2016, I’m impressed with how far we’ve come. We’ve doubled our staff and inked partnership with Visa, Alipay, Spring, Bridge2Solutions, Progressive Leasing and dozens more. We’ve launched innovative products, including the Marqeta Digital Wallet SDK, Marqeta.js, and Marqeta’s Virtual Card Wizard, and we’ve continuously improved our groundbreaking, patent-pending “Just-in-Time” Funding feature.

Every enterprise we speak with wants to provide its customers with a customized, unique, seamless payments experience that sets them apart. We can help. We’ll be doing more with commerce innovators, tech giants and yes, even banks, going forward — essentially anyone else who wants to turn their payments capabilities into a competitive advantage. The time is now for companies to identify and act upon the larger shifts occurring in the economy and within commerce and payments in particular. From partners who have already made this transition to those we’re helping on a daily basis, we’re working hard to continue this innovation and leadership. Onward and upward.

By Omri Dahan, CRO