Offering a Card Is Simple to Decide and Difficult to Build

Exchanges, wallets, and Web3 platforms have arrived at the same conclusion over the past two years. Users who hold stablecoin balances need a way to spend them, and the platform that provides it earns interchange on that spending, keeps balances on the platform, and turns an occasional trading relationship into a daily one.

The demand for stablecoin spending is already sitting in their user bases. In the BVNK and YouGov Stablecoin Utility Report 2026, 71% of surveyed users said they would use a linked debit card to spend their stablecoins. This demand is also translating into actual spending, with Artemis reporting digital asset card spending growing at a 106% compound annual rate between early 2023 and late 2025.

Deciding a card is worth offering is the easy part. The difficulty comes next, when a platform works out what it would take to launch one. While a card looks like a feature the product team can build, issuing a card means running a regulated financial operation, and that operation is far larger than most platforms expect.

The Work That Sits Behind a Single Card

The experience a cardholder sees is deliberately simple. They tap, the stablecoin balance behind the card is converted at the point of transaction, and the merchant is paid in fiat. What makes a card programme difficult to build is not any single piece of that chain, but the fact that none of it can be launched in stages. Every part is a regulated activity, and the first card cannot be issued until all the pieces are running smoothly.

The card networks, such as Visa and Mastercard, decide who may issue cards that run on their rails, and a platform has to be admitted before its cards can work anywhere. Every card also needs a Bank Identification Number, the opening digits that tell the network which licensed institution issued the card, and only a licensed issuer can be given one. When a cardholder pays, a processor has to approve or decline the transaction within a second or two, and a settlement operation has to pay the merchant's bank on time, with money held in reserve to guarantee those payments.

The work does not stop once the payment goes through. Cardholders have to be identity-checked before they are approved. Fraud systems have to judge which transactions to allow. Physical cards have to be manufactured and posted. A support team has to handle disputed charges and refunds.

Building all of these means hiring compliance officers, risk analysts, and settlement operators, applying for licences, and then running the whole operation permanently. Platforms that go down this route are not just adding a feature to their existing product, but building a whole second business next to it.

The Licence, Not the Technology, Is the Real Barrier

Of everything on that list, licensing takes the longest, and a platform needs two separate approvals to clear it.

The first approval comes from the card networks, since a card only works where the network is accepted. Artemis puts Visa alone at more than 90% of on-chain card volume, so network admission is what determines whether a stablecoin card reaches the merchants users already shop at. Visa's published guidance describes two ways to get approval. The first is to become a Principal, licensed by Visa directly, settling funds with Visa itself, and fully responsible for the cards it issues. The second is to become an Associate, sponsored by a Principal and issuing cards under that Principal's licence rather than one of its own. Mastercard runs the same arrangement under different names, as do the other card networks. Every card in circulation is therefore issued either by a licensed member of a network, or by a company operating under a licensed member's approval. Visa also notes that its Principal clients are usually large institutions with real expertise in risk, credit, and collections, which is the standard an applicant is measured against.

The second approval comes from a financial regulator, and a network licence does not substitute for it. This includes the Monetary Authority of Singapore in Singapore, the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK, and a combination of federal and state banking regulators in the United States. A platform still needs its regulator's permission to handle customer money before any network will let it issue cards.

In recent times, both approvals have become harder to obtain. Seven major economies now regulate stablecoins as payment instruments: the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates, and Japan, each requiring licensed issuers, full reserve backing, and a guaranteed right of redemption. Clear rules are good for the market, since a platform building a stablecoin card today knows exactly what it is building against. Clear rules also mean more requirements to satisfy, more documentation to produce, and a longer wait for approval.

Turning a Multi-Year Build Into a Months-Long Launch

The licensing, the network memberships, and the operations behind them do not have to be built by the platform that wants a card. A Cards-as-a-Service (CaaS) partner already holds all of it, and a platform launches its own card programme through the partner's systems instead of assembling and licensing an equivalent set of its own.

The first advantage is speed. Launching through a CaaS partner puts a card in users' hands in months rather than years, which lets a platform capture the spending demand already sitting in its user base. Users who hold stablecoins and want to spend them will find a way to do so. With plenty of competitors already live, a platform that spends years building its own card issuing operation gives those users time to move their balances to a competitor that already has one.

The second advantage is revenue that does not depend on market conditions. Trading revenue rises and falls with the market, so a platform that relies on it earns least during the quiet periods. Everyday spending holds steadier than that, since users buy groceries and pay for transport whether markets are up or down, and every purchase made on the platform's card returns a share of interchange to the platform. A card therefore changes what the platform is to its users, from somewhere they visit when they want to trade to somewhere they draw on every day.

Launching a Card Programme With DCS DeCard

A card programme can be launched in one of two forms, and the choice comes down to whose brand the cardholder sees and how much of the programme the platform wants to own. A white-label programme is the platform's own card. It carries the platform's branding entirely, with end-to-end issuing infrastructure and a fully customisable user experience, and the provider behind it is invisible to the cardholder. This route suits platforms that want the card to be unmistakably their own. 

A co-branded programme is a shared-brand card carrying both names, with custom rewards and cashback mechanics designed around the platform's users. Integration is faster, which makes this the quicker of the two routes to market.

DCS DeCard offers both. It is the stablecoin card issuance arm of DCS Group, a Singapore-based payments company with over 50 years of MAS-regulated card-issuing heritage and licensed partnerships with multiple card networks. Every partnership includes card production and delivery, integration and API support, identity verification and fraud protection, and data and analytics. 

What stands between a platform and a card programme is the licensing, the network memberships, and the regulated operations behind them. With DCS DeCard, a platform can launch a fully branded card programme without building any of it.

If you are considering a card programme for your users, explore what a DCS DeCard partnership looks like here: https://www.thedecard.com/dcscc/en/landing/partners