The card layer: Spend management, creator payouts, and what's next for platforms
While the payments industry debates what comes next, the card has been quietly doing the work all along. Cards still account for more than half of global point-of-sale transactions, and digital wallets don't replace that share; they ride on top of it.
This session reframes the card not as a legacy object, but as a programmable layer, and focuses on two places where that's showing up commercially right now.
Spend and expense management
Most companies think they've solved expense management. But the reimbursement model means employees float costs, finance chases receipts, and policy gets enforced weeks after the money is gone. This session walks through what changes when you move spend onto programmable card infrastructure: just-in-time funding, virtual cards on demand, real-time category controls, and ERP sync that makes reconciliation automatic rather than manual.
Creator and entertainment payouts
Creators and gamers function like small businesses, with irregular income, business expenses, and cross-border complexity, but most of the infrastructure serving them was built for suppliers, not entrepreneurs. The session covers what faster payouts, branded wallets, spend segmentation, and fan engagement mechanics look like on a card layer built for this market.
The common thread: flexible credentials
The two use cases look nothing alike, but both point to the same infrastructure answer: a flexible credential that adapts at authorization rather than being fixed at issuance. One card that can behave as debit for a twelve-dollar lunch, credit for a large purchase, and a cross-border instrument when the user is abroad, all decided by rules rather than baked in at issuance.
What's next
The session closes on three things on the horizon: AI-driven spend controls that adapt in real time, stablecoin-backed settlement that lets creators get paid across borders without the traditional payout drag, and the programmable infrastructure agentic commerce will require when an AI is the one making the purchase.
What you'll take away
- Why cards still dominate payments, and what "the card is dying" coverage gets wrong
- The specific mechanics that make programmable expense management different from a standard corporate card program
- Why creators represent an underserved SME segment, and what financial infrastructure they actually need
- How a single flexible credential replaces a drawer full of point solutions
- A grounded look at AI, stablecoins, and agentic payments, and the infrastructure decision that matters now
Speakers
- Jas Shah, Founder, Fintech: Under The Hood. A fintech product leader with nearly 20 years on the product side of payments, banking, and innovation, including building card programs as part of digital bank builds.
- Julian Armington, VP of Product Marketing, Marqeta. Works with platforms evaluating whether and how to add a card to what they already offer.
- Amy McWilliams (host), Content Strategy, Marqeta.
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