Nearly two thirds of consumers say they would replace their existing debit card with a flexible credential if one were available to them. That single number tells you everything about where payments are heading. The card they tap at the coffee shop, the credential they use to split a vacation rental, the bank account their paycheck lands in: all of these are converging into something fundamentally different from what existed five years ago.
At Money20/20 Europe, Marqeta's Chief Revenue Officer Todd Pollak sat down with Preethi Mariappan from Visa Europe and Klarna's Raji Behal to explore what that shift actually means for businesses building financial products today. The conversation was wide-ranging, but it kept returning to one central idea: flexibility is no longer a product feature. It is becoming the foundation of how payments work.
A single card no longer means a single payment option
For decades, a card was a fixed product. You had a debit card, a credit card (probably more than one,) maybe a prepaid card, and each one had its own rules, its own economics, and its own constraints. Consumers juggled multiple options in their wallet and made a choice at the point of sale.
That is changing fast. Marqeta's own 2025 State of Payments research found that within any given 30-day period:
- 81% of US consumers surveyed used cash
- 77% used credit cards
- 69% used debit cards
- 69% used peer-to-peer apps
People are not loyal to a single payment method. They apply different credentials to different types of purchases, in real time, based on context.
The opportunity is to put all of that flexibility into a single credential. The Visa Flexible Credential (VFC) makes that possible.
What is a flexible credential?
Flexible credential: A single payment card that can dynamically switch between funding sources (such as debit, credit, or BNPL) at the moment of transaction, based on consumer preference or issuer-defined rules.
Unlike traditional cards tied to one payment rail, flexible credentials give issuers and program managers the ability to offer multi-rail card products without requiring consumers to carry multiple cards or merchants to modify their checkout flows.
Making flexible credentials work
Marqeta was the first issuer processor certified for VFC in the US, and Todd was direct about what that involved.
"We had the job of making flexible credentials work," he said. Going through the merchant to get access to the checkout was the old world. That is not necessary now.
Key difference from legacy BNPL:
- Before: Enabling installment payments required merchant-side integration—plugins, checkout modifications, approval workflows. Consumers had to discover the option in the merchant's checkout flow.
- Now: The flexibility lives in the credential itself. The card decides, in real time, how a transaction should be funded, without the merchant needing to do anything differently.
That shift opens up a much larger addressable market for flexible payment experiences. And it brings BNPL into a whole new context.
"BNPL is used by 33 of Marqeta's customers and millions of their cardholders because it is such a powerful proposition," Todd said. Incorporating BNPL into flexible credentials is powerful.
The numbers back that up. Marqeta has seen meaningful demographic and category expansion in BNPL usage, with the product reaching consumers and purchase categories that earlier versions of buy now, pay later never touched. And critically, that growth has not come with rising defaults.
Build vs. buy: the question every platform is asking about payments
One of the interesting moments in the panel came when the conversation turned to Marqeta, what we do, and whether companies should consider owning more of their payment stack.
The short answer from Todd: understand what it actually takes before you decide.
What building in-house requires:
- Compliant platform (KYC, AML, PCI-DSS)
- Fraud management systems
- Network certification (Visa, Mastercard)
- BIN sponsorship or banking relationships
- Ongoing regulatory compliance across jurisdictions
Marqeta processed nearly $400 billion in total processing volume in 2025. This kind of scale takes years and significant capital to build in-house.
The smarter question is not "how do we own more of the stack?" It is "where do we actually differentiate?" For most businesses, the answer is the product experience and the customer relationship, not the issuing infrastructure. The infrastructure should be invisible and the experience should be exceptional.
From 15 markets to wherever consumers are
One of the concrete proof points in the session was the Klarna Card expansion. After a successful US launch, Marqeta helped Klarna bring its flexible debit card experience to 15 European markets, giving consumers the ability to pay now or pay later on a single card, powered by VFC technology.
That kind of rapid, multi-market expansion is exactly what a modern card issuing platform is designed to enable. One integration, many markets, consistent experience. For any business thinking about building financial products that scale across borders, it is a meaningful signal about what is now possible.
The next frontier: agentic commerce
The panel closed with a look further ahead, and the conversation around AI and agentic commerce was notably grounded compared to many industry discussions on the topic.
Todd stated that he believes 2026 will be a proving ground: less about flashy demos and more about disciplined experimentation with meaningful use cases. The "agentic research" capabilities that emerged in 2025 will begin scaling into full, data-driven applications, but agentic commerce will evolve more carefully, and rightly so.
What Marqeta is focused on is the issuer side of that equation, a perspective that is often underrepresented in agentic commerce discussions. Much of the current conversation centers on merchants and acquirers using AI to drive sales. Less attention has been paid to how issuers could embed AI to assist with purchasing decisions directly from the card. That is the space Marqeta is exploring, including through its MCP server, which gives AI agents a standardized, secure way to access and use Marqeta's payment APIs.
For agentic commerce to reach its potential, payments have to be responsibly incorporated into AI workflows while maintaining the compliance standards and consumer protections the industry has built over decades. Getting that balance right matters more than moving fast.
What this means for businesses building today
The thread running through the Money20/20 panel was that the payments infrastructure decisions companies make now will shape their ability to compete for the next decade.
Flexible credentials are not a niche fintech product. They are becoming the new operating system for payments, enabling issuers and platforms to build more dynamic, more personalized, and more valuable financial experiences than static card programs have ever allowed.
The companies that get ahead of that shift will not be the ones that built the most complex in-house stack. They will be the ones that partnered with the right infrastructure providers, stayed focused on their customer experience above all else, and moved quickly when the technology made something genuinely new possible.
