Euronet Targets Credit Growth With CoreCard Acquisition

Euronet Worldwide is making a strategic push into credit card issuing and flexible payment products, combining its established payments infrastructure with a newly acquired modern processing platform to challenge both legacy systems and fintech competitors.

The Kansas City-headquartered fintech, which is listed on Nasdaq, operates in real-time digital and cash payments across more than 200 countries. 

With over 30 years in the payments space, the company's card issuing product, called Ren, provides financial institutions and fintechs with comprehensive solutions spanning card programme definition, authorisation, fraud protection, disputes and loyalty rewards.

Vishal Pasari, Vice President of Products and Partnerships at Euronet Worldwide, explains that whilst the company has built a global client base from Ecuador to New Zealand with its debit and prepaid card issuing services, credit cards present the most significant growth opportunity.

The economics are compelling. Debit cards carry limited profitability for banks, particularly large US institutions subject to the Durban Amendment, which caps interchange fees. 

"Debit cards are not very profitable for banks. They're considered a cost of doing business," Vishal notes. 

Prepaid cards have faced increased scrutiny following regulatory issues and the collapse of companies like Synapse, a banking-as-a-service platform that failed in 2024.

Oscar Munoz, Vice President of Sales for the Americas at Euronet Worldwide, explains that credit delivers returns that dwarf alternatives. 

“Revolving credit has higher yields in general, and it also gives you that higher and more recurrent engagement with your customers,” he says.

The engagement extends beyond transaction frequency to relationship depth. "They're the kind of products that really give you that deep connection to the company and that deep product market penetration," Oscar continues. 

Banks and fintechs increasingly seek to own more of the customer relationship while capturing greater economics from credit offerings.

Vishal cites McKinsey research showing that over five years, more than 40% of net new revenue for banks would come from consumer credit cards. "Credit on the other hand presents a large growing opportunity," he explains.

BNPL growth signals market transformation

The explosive growth of buy now pay later services signals fundamental shifts in consumer credit demand. Research and Markets estimates the BNPL market will reach a value of US$560bn by the end of 2025, growing 13.7% on an annual basis as consumers increasingly value flexible payments. 

"It's clear there is significant and growing demand for these flexible credit products," Oscar says. The shift encompasses traditional credit cards alongside emerging formats, including cardless loans and flexible installment products. 

Embedded finance models are making credit available to broader consumer segments through new distribution channels.

Oscar warns that institutions offering unchanged credit products face mounting competitive pressure. 

"If you're a fintech that had great success with prepaid and debit but haven't really jumped into credit, you're going to have to respond to these things fairly quickly," he says.

Rather than building a credit card processing platform from scratch, Euronet pursued an acquisition strategy. 

Vishal describes a market divided between established legacy processors with comprehensive but inflexible solutions and modern fintechs struggling to handle credit card complexity.

"On one hand, you have the duopoly of legacy players who have fairly comprehensive solutions, but they're not suited to the agility of the modern payments landscape," Vishal says. 

"On the other hand, you have modern fintechs who have tried to make a dent in the credit card industry, but with very limited success."

Credit card processing involves numerous edge cases that require sophisticated handling. Vishal provides an example of the complexity involved when a consumer disputes a transaction from previous months. 

"You have to reverse a transaction, then you've got to figure out what to do with the interest, the fees," he explains. "What if I made a payment on that transaction or a partial payment? Where should I apply that payment?"

"It can get really complex really fast, and knowing how to handle that is key," Vishal continues.

CoreCard acquisition brings proven scale

Euronet found its solution in CoreCard, an API-driven credit card processor serving major clients including Goldman Sachs, American Express and Apple. The Apple Card partnership has handled billions of transactions. Vishal describes Apple Card as "arguably one of the most successful card programmes in the history of card issuing". 

The company announced its CoreCard merger in July 2025, with completion expected shortly after the Money20/20 conference.

"CoreCard combined with Ren gives us a comprehensive, robust, modern platform that can meet the needs of not only traditional banks but also fintech innovators," Vishal says.

He uses a quadrant framework to explain Euronet's competitive positioning, with one axis representing platform maturity and the other representing modern agility. "We are fortunate to be on the positive side of both, which puts us in a unique and differentiated space," he explains.

Addressing the patching problem

Many banks operate on technology platforms built 30 or 40 years ago, creating fundamental obstacles when launching products those systems were never designed to support. 

Short-term instalments, BNPL, digital wallets and tokenisation require capabilities legacy cores simply cannot provide.

Oscar observes that numerous organisations attempt superficial fixes by layering fintech solutions over outdated infrastructure. 

"The reality is that's only adding complexity to a problem already," he says. "The only real solution is that you have to have a path to migrating to a truly modern platform."

However, migration cannot disrupt existing operations. For banks operating legacy platforms, Vishal recommends an adjunct approach rather than complete replacement. 

Institutions can launch new programmes or verticals on the modern platform, operationalise the new system, then gradually migrate existing card programmes.

"There's an overwhelming desire to modernise, but also an overwhelming fear to modernise just because of what it takes to migrate out of a platform," Vishal reveals. 

"Dip your feet in with a new platform, put a new programme on it, or a new vertical. Perhaps if you offer consumer cards through legacy technology, you could offer commercial cards through a new platform."

The challenge intensifies for organisations managing substantial transaction volumes. Oscar uses a vivid analogy to describe the difficulty. "Anyone can fix a highway that has no traffic. When no cars are passing, it's easy to fix it," he says. 

"But when you have millions of transactions running to that highway and you need to fix it while you're creating new exits and new paths to modernisation, that requires different skills."

Microservices enabling phased migration

Euronet's microservices architecture enables targeted implementations without forcing clients to adopt comprehensive platform suites. The microservices span issuing solutions for prepaid, debit and revolving credit alongside acquiring capabilities, ATM administration and direct-to-account functionality.

"We can surgically keep increasing the sets of microservices you require to continue taking you to the next phase," Oscar says. Phase migration becomes possible where institutions address immediate priorities whilst creating paths toward broader transformation.

For organisations entering the credit space, Vishal emphasises clarity on product progression. "You need to be clear on your product graduation journey," he says, outlining potential paths from prepaid and debit through secured cards to revolving credit.

Companies must ensure their processor can support that journey with proven solutions. "Quite often you'll see slideware, and that slideware is just that," Vishal warns. "You need to make sure there's proven scale solutions behind that."

Market differentiation remains crucial for new entrants. "You don't want to end up in the maze of mirrors where you're doing exactly what everyone else is doing," Vishal says. He highlights a customer offering secured credit cards backed by home equity rather than cash deposits, where cardholders only pay interest on amounts they use.

Mission-critical infrastructure

Euronet's private cloud infrastructure spans 14 instances across eight countries, providing deployment options beyond public cloud or on-premise installation. Oscar says that reliability requirements for money movement exceed typical technology standards.

"The transactions have to work 100% of the time, not 99.99%," he explains. Euronet operates the second-largest money remittance company globally, processing payments that directly impact recipients' ability to meet basic needs. "If a remittance doesn't get somewhere, somebody doesn't pay the rent. So it has social impact," Oscar says.

Euronet's 680,000 payment touchpoints represent infrastructure accumulated over 30 years that competitors cannot replicate quickly. The company uses its own payment products internally for core business operations. "We eat our own dog food in that sense," Vishal explains. "We don't just build this to sell it, we build this to use it."

One Euronet model

Euronet's integrated approach spans money remittance through Ria, digital content through Epay, foreign exchange through XE and real-time cross-border payments through Dandelion across over 190 countries. This breadth enables single-supplier relationships that reduce institutional complexity.

"If you have just one supplier, this means less risk for your organisation," Oscar says. When banks pursue domestic real-time payment capabilities through networks like FedNow while simultaneously seeking global reach, Euronet can address both requirements through integrated infrastructure.

The integrated model delivers particular advantages as payment methods converge. Traditional card payments and direct-to-account real-time transfers have historically operated as separate domains, yet convergence is accelerating globally, as demonstrated by India's UPI system and Brazil's Pix network.

"It is now normal that you can go to a point of sale and you can pay with your card, or you can pay with a QR code directly to an account," Oscar says.

Vishal notes that Asia Pacific markets demonstrate more advanced flexible funding models, where a single card account can process transactions as debit, instalment, credit or prepaid depending on purchase type. 

"Under the same account, under the same card, you can make a transaction that's treated as a debit or an instalment plan or a credit transaction," he explains.

With over 10,000 employees operating globally, Euronet can apply learnings from diverse markets to clients everywhere. 

"Unlike most payment companies that operate in a similar country or region, we're fortunate that we operate on a global scale," Vishal says.

Future of payments

Looking ahead, Vishal anticipates continued evolution in payment form factors. Credit cards emerged in the 1930s as metal charge plates, progressing through cardboard and plastic before becoming digital with Apple Pay and Google Pay in the 2010s.

"We're now getting used to the concept of invisible payments, embedded payments," Vishal says. 

He cites Uber as an example where passengers enter and exit vehicles without actively processing payments. "Payment is not the experience. Payments enable the experience," he explains.

Real-time settlement will replace batch processing, enabling instant merchant payments upon card authorisation. Artificial intelligence is already enhancing fraud protection and personalisation capabilities, though Vishal views current applications as preliminary. 

"That's just the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot more opportunity when it comes to using AI to make the experiences better, to make the process more efficient," he concludes.