Visa and open API payment card issuing platform Marqeta have entered into a multi-year, global partnership to drive further innovations in commercial and consumer payments.

Additionally, Visa has made a strategic investment in Marqeta to support Marqeta’s domestic and international growth objectives.

The initial efforts of the partnership will involve growing opportunities for virtual, physical and tokenized payments across a number of commercial markets and use cases that can benefit from Marqeta’s developer-friendly platform.

"We're excited to partner with Marqeta to collectively bring our unique assets and capabilities to more partners and clients globally," said Jim McCarthy, executive vice president, innovation and strategic partnerships, Visa. "We are always looking for partnerships and investments that allow us to evaluate innovative, new ways to support our clients’ needs, and increasingly see open, developer-friendly platforms as a way to help clients move quickly in today's fast-paced environment."

The market for electronic payments continues to grow in commercial payables, alternative lending, disbursements, eCommerce, on-demand services and P2P payments. To enable this growth, Marqeta’s platform and patent-pending Just-In-Time (“JIT”) Funding feature allows companies of all sizes to authorize their own card transactions, fundamentally changing how companies engage with card issuing and transaction processing. Developers on Marqeta’s platform can sign up for a sandbox in under a minute and then leverage Marqeta’s modern set of card controls and configurations to get a fully funded card program to market in a matter of days.

“The Marqeta core processing platform is architected from the ground up to be the most modern, flexible and developer friendly platform anywhere in the market today,” said Marqeta CEO, Jason Gardner. “We’re democratizing access to innovation for new issuers and fintech players, and we’re proud to partner with Visa and its broader ecosystem.”

This is the latest partnership and investment for Visa with an emerging innovator within the payments ecosystem. As a global payments technology company, Visa continually evaluates technologies of all kinds – especially those that have the potential to advance digital payments for Visa’s clients and their customers. Recently, Visa has made investments in Chain, Klarna, Square and Stripe, among others.