In financial services, confidence is currency, and compliance is how you earn it.
Banks, neobanks, lenders, and fintechs are under pressure from all sides. Regulatory scrutiny is intensifying. And as customer expectations rise, the cost of compliance failures grows.
Compliance doesn’t have to be a burden. With the right payment infrastructure, it can transform into a powerful advantage—a driving force for accelerated growth, stronger trust, and scalable innovation.
Modern payment platforms like Marqeta are helping financial services organizations simplify the complex, streamline compliance, and empower organizations to innovate with confidence for the future.
The moment compliance becomes a growth problem
Imagine you're the CTO of a fast-growing fintech lender.
You’ve just closed a funding round, and your team is gearing up to launch a new digital disbursement product. But before you can move forward, you hit a wall: you need to navigate KYC/AML checks, implement fraud prevention tools, set up secure card issuing, and ensure PCI DSS compliance, all while staying on schedule.
You don’t have a full-time compliance team, and you don’t have the funding for one either. You don’t have months to build custom risk rules. And you definitely don’t want to delay launch. But in spite of the lack of funding, you remain clear on one thing: compliance is a non-negotiable.
Instead of juggling a patchwork of vendors, you choose a modern payment platform—one that views compliance not as a “nice to have” but as a fundamental necessity. That’s why it’s designed to integrate compliance into its core infrastructure. With a few API calls and expert support, your product goes live in as little as 8 weeks instead of 8 months.. And it scales confidently across geographies.
That’s what it looks like when compliance becomes an accelerator, not an obstacle.
This blog explores how platforms like Marqeta support financial services companies by helping them simplify compliance, reduce risk, and build trust faster.
The financial services compliance landscape: complex and unforgiving
Financial institutions face a broad and ever-evolving regulatory landscape. From KYC/AML requirements and PCI DSS compliance to transaction reporting, the list grows longer, and more global, by the year.
Some of the biggest challenges include:
- Global fragmentation: Compliance expectations vary widely across regions, especially for companies operating across borders. What's required in the EU/UK under PSD2 differs from US regulations.
- Operational overhead: Manual processes for customer onboarding, risk review, and transaction monitoring strain internal teams.
- Legacy tech limitations: Traditional payment infrastructure often lacks the flexibility to respond to real-time regulatory updates.
- High stakes: The penalties for non-compliance range from costly fines and reputational damage to complete loss of license.
In this environment, staying compliant isn’t just about checking boxes. It’s about being able to respond quickly, scale responsibly, and win customer trust at every step.
Why embedded compliance outperforms after-the-fact oversight
Many financial services firms treat compliance as a separate layer—an additional function stacked onto product development or payment flows. But it’s not a product, it’s a process.
Modern platforms like Marqeta embed compliance features at the infrastructure level, giving financial institutions the tools they need to monitor, manage, and automate compliance in real time.
Some examples include:
- Real-time fraud monitoring: Identify anomalies before they escalate, such as BIN attacks, transaction fraud, etc.
- Dynamic spend controls: Set granular rules for where, how, and when funds can be used. For example, automatically blocking transactions outside business hours in restricted geographies—without any manual input from the compliance team.
- Tokenization at scale: Secure card data with encryption from the point of issuance, ensuring PCI DSS compliance by design rather than retrofit.
- Custom authorization logic: Help determine whether to approve or decline transactions based on live data and risk parameters aligned to your business.
- Automated KYC/AML: Faster customer onboarding with automated identity verification, risk scoring, and ongoing monitoring.
Explore Marqeta’s real-time payment controls →
For example, a neobank issuing corporate cards across the U.S. and Europe, this might mean automatically flagging transactions outside business hours in restricted geographies.
A trusted partner for compliance at scale
With Program Management Services, Marqeta doesn’t just provide tools—it offers help with end-to-end support from a dedicated team of risk, compliance, and regulatory specialists.
That includes:
- AML/KYC onboarding and ongoing monitoring of identities
- PCI DSS, SOC1, SOC2 and SSAE 18 compliance
- Cardholder dispute management and fraud oversight
- Bank and card network partner coordination and approvals
Another example, a fintech lender launching a new disbursement product can lean on Marqeta’s team to help navigate issuer bank requirements, set up BIN sponsorships, and establish compliant transaction rules—all without building a risk team from scratch.
Global reach and compliance
For companies with international ambitions, compliance becomes exponentially more complex.
But Marqeta is designed for scale. Its platform supports card issuing in 40+ countries, offering controls and compliance logic that help financial institutions expand faster, without introducing more regulatory risk.
Whether you’re enabling embedded lending, or contractor payouts, Marqeta helps your program adhere to local rules and global standards from day one.
Learn more about Marqeta’s global issuing capabilities →
Turning regulatory burden into strategic confidence
Here’s what happens when compliance is built into your infrastructure instead of bolted on:
- Optimized product launches — Because compliance isn’t an afterthought.
- Streamlined audits and reporting — With dashboards and data designed for transparency.
- Fewer manual errors — Thanks to automated workflows and real-time decision-making.
- Increased customer trust — Because users recognize security, control, and integrity.
Whether you're a fintech startup launching your first card program or a global bank modernizing legacy rails, compliance can be your advantage—if you’ve got the right platform behind you.
Ready to build with confidence?
Marqeta brings together experienced compliance professionals, flexible infrastructure, and enterprise-grade support to help financial institutions launch and scale payment programs with confidence.
Let’s simplify the complex—together.