The Unified Card Issuance is designed to give your business complete flexibility over how capital is accessed and managed. A single, unified platform that allows you to issue and manage cards for any use case, whether it’s giving an employee a corporate expense card or providing a customer with a personal card.

Type of Unified Cards

There are two primary types of cards to suit operational needs:

1. Debit Cards: These cards are linked directly to a Passport account, giving users immediate access to their funds online, or through ATMs and POS machines. We support issuance for:
   1. Individual Customers: Issued directly to the account holder.
   2. Business Customers: Issued to Authorized Signatories or Beneficial Owners.
2. Prepaid Cards: Designed for corporate control, these are pre-funded instruments used to cover day-to-day business expenses such as travel, meals, lodging, and incidentals.

Note: Prepaid cards are exclusively available for Business Customers.

Issue Unified Cards (Debit & Prepaid)

1. To begin, you can Issue a Card using the POST /v1/customer/id/{customer_id}/issuance/card endpoint. This single endpoint handles the logic for both card types “DEBIT” where the card is linked directly to the customer's Passport account balance and “PREPAID” to create a pre-funded expense card (Business Only).

(will be adding mandatory nodes here as a table)

2. Once a card is issued, you can fetch the specific record by calling Retrieve Card at GET /v1/customer/id/{customer_id}/issuance/card/id/{card_id} endpoint where id is the Unique card id of the issued card.

Issue Unified Cards (Physical)

If a user was originally issued a virtual-only card but later requires a plastic card for ATM access or in-person payments, you do not need to create a new account.

1. You can order a Physical Card by calling POST /v1/customer/id/{customer_id}/account/id/{account_id}/debitCard/id/{card_id}/issuePhysicalCard endpoint. This endpoint initiates the manufacturing and shipping process to the card holder address.
2. For security, all physical cards are shipped in a "Frozen" or "Inactive" state to prevent fraud during transit. Once the cardholder receives the plastic card, you must explicitly unlock "Card Present" transactions by calling POST /v1/customer/id/{customer_id}/account/id/{account_id}/debitCard/id/{card_id}/enablePhysicalCard. This step confirms the chain of custody and activates the card for use at Point-of-Sale terminals.

View Issued Unified Cards

You can List all Issued Cards through your card base using this POST /v1/customer/id/{customer_id}/issuance/card/list endpoint. This allows you to filter results via "type" (Prepaid vs. Debit), status (Inactive vs. Active), cardHolder.typeetc.

Once your Unified Card is issued successfully, you can then proceed with other Card Management actions.

Open Questions

1. How do we mention “Auto-issuance” use case ? Shall it be included here ?
2. Card Embossment to also be clarified ? Shall it too be a part of this section?

See Also