Marqeta’s Parker on evolution of its card issuing platform

At Money20/20 Europe in Amsterdam, Jeff Parker, SVP and MD International at Marqeta, describes the evolution in the way businesses are using their platform.

“We’ve seen a big shift over the last couple of years to expense management, which is a really interesting evolution,” Parker tells FinTech Magazine. As interest rates rise in many countries and cost-of-living pressures continue, many business leaders are keen to remain on top of their expenses and keep costs down.

All of this is possible because Marqeta’s platform uses a single code base, which customers can then build on top of. The card-issuing company also sees increasing prevalence for traditional banks launching their own neobanks, which Parker describes as an “interesting” trend, as well as a shift towards embedded finance and non-finance companies using the Marqeta platform.

Generally, he says that businesses still lag behind customers in the switch over to digital wallets – but not necessarily because businesses are slow, but because customers are speeding so far ahead. Marqeta recently released a payments survey report that shows 90% of consumers are very comfortable using a digital wallet.

“Money20/20 is a really big event for Marqeta,” Parker tells us. “We’re here for a number of reasons: one is to see existing clients. It’s the one opportunity we get to see all of our clients in one place. It’s a really efficient way of connecting with them. We’re also looking to talk to a number of clients or prospective clients and really lead that sales process, and then personally for me it’s a great way to connect with other industry experts around the globe.”

Looking ahead to the future of the business, Parker continues: “Europe is our big bet outside the US. We’re obviously much smaller here than we are in the US, so a lot of effort will be placed into building that scale. That’s really expanding our product set, bringing our programme management capabilities into Europe. 

“We did an acquisition in the US of a credit programme manager [Power Finance] earlier this year. We expect to bring that into Europe next year. Also we’re starting to explore how we bring adjacent payment opportunities – so non-card payments like account-to-account – into our product suite because we know that most of our customers have a need for non-card payments as well, and so, we believe that the more we can provide a one-stop shop for some of those needs, we’ll provide more value to our customers.”