About Cards

You can issue cards in the following form factors:

You can also provision digital wallet tokens for use in digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Wallet. Digital wallets enable users to make in-store and online payments using any device storing their tokenized card. Each token is based on an existing physical or virtual card. For more information on tokenization and digital wallets, see Digital Wallets and Tokenization.

You can configure a card to be usable once or multiple times.

You can set the number of active or suspended cards each user can own. The following card ownership scenarios are possible:

For information on creating original cards and reissuing existing cards, see Issuance and reissuance.

When issuing a card, you can choose to create an original card or to reissue an existing card. A reissued card behaves the same and has the same card number as the source card. For example, if a card has expired, you can reissue the card with the same PAN and a new expiration date.

You can only reissue a source card once; the source card can be an original card or a reissued card. For example, you might create an original-issue Card A, then reissue Card A as Card B, and then reissue Card B as Card C, resulting in a reissue chain that looks like this: "Card A > Card B > Card C".

You can also configure whether the original card is automatically terminated or remains active when reissued, though this is limited by your program’s maximum active card limit. Contact a Marqeta representative to determine how many active cards your users can own.

Cards must be activated before use. You can configure your card product so that new cards are active upon issuance. In general, new physical cards are shipped in an unactivated state, while new virtual cards are digitally presented (shown on a screen, for example) and active immediately.

Activating an original-issue card (as opposed to a reissued card) never affects other cards owned by the user. An error is returned if any attempted activation would result in the user owning more active and/or suspended cards than the maximum allowed by the program configuration.

It may not be possible to move a card from one user to another user once the card has been activated.

If you issue unactivated cards, you must provide your cardholders a method for activating them. The method you choose depends on your implementation and data security compliance requirements.

Available methods for activating cards include:

To make a card temporarily non-functional, you can limit or suspend it. A limited card is temporarily non-functional except for card-on-file transactions such as installment payments or recurring charges. A suspended card is temporarily non-functional for all transactions.

Limited and suspended cards can transition back to the active state.

To make a card permanently non-functional, you can transition it to the terminated state. Terminated cards cannot be reactivated.

When you create a new card, the Marqeta platform assigns an expiration date and time. When the expiration time is reached, the card is terminated automatically. You can set the expiration date for a card product or an individual card.

When a cardholder is separated from their card or it becomes physically non-functional, you should take action to limit potential fraud and provide the user a functional card.

In general, you should respond to card problems in the following ways:

In general, an active card belongs to a single user for its lifetime. For some use cases, however, you might want to move an active card from one user to another, enabling the card to draw funds from the balance of a different account on demand. This allows the cardholder to spend from multiple accounts using the same card.

For example, an expense program might have a cardholder represented by a user named "John_Smith" with two child users named "John_Smith_Food" and "John_Smith_Travel". Note that in this example, these child accounts all belong to the same person but are distinct users on the Marqeta platform. Each child user has its own balance and is associated with its own card.

Each user on the Marqeta platform has a general purpose account (GPA) that holds funds used to make payments. For more information, see About Account Holders.

The cardholder, John Smith, is at a restaurant and wants to spend from his "John_Smith_Food" child account using the associated card ("John_Smith_Food_Card"), but he accidentally brought the card associated with "John_Smith_Travel". He wants to be able to login to the mobile app he uses to manage his cards so he can update his "John_Smith_Travel_Card" card to draw funds from his "John_Smith_Food" account.

To move a card to another user, send a PUT request to /cards/{token} and include the user_token of the alternate account you want to use. For example, to update John Smith’s travel card so it spends funds from the account of "John_Smith_Food", send the following PUT request to /cards/John_Smith_Travel_Card:

Future spending draws funds from the newly associated account and any existing spend controls associated with the account holder apply when spending with the card. You can send additional PUT requests to move the card to the original user or to another user.

When a user spends with a card, the token of the account that funded the transaction is included in the associated transaction object. Any subsequent related transactions, such as a clearing message, retain the token from the original transaction, even if the card moves between users in the meantime. For more information, see About Transactions.