Galileo and Mastercard collaborate on powerful new tool to speed digital payments solutions to market.

Galileo today announced Galileo Instant Issuing, a lightning fast, frictionless option for fintechs and other businesses to open bank accounts and issue debit cards to power digital payment solutions—with no long-term contracts or high startup fees.

Beginning later this month, developers at all sizes and types of organizations—including fintech, marketplace, e-commerce and gig-economy businesses—can start using Galileo Instant Issuing, leveraging Galileo’s powerful open APIs to quickly create digital payments solutions. (Business and cardholder approval is required before accounts and cards are funded.) In addition to expanding the sizes and types of organizations that can sponsor digital payments solutions, Galileo Instant Issuing reduces the cost of entry and time to market of traditional options.

“Innovators have understood the opportunity of using debit cards in new ways, but when they started looking to put their concepts into action, they discovered the high-friction, high-cost and time-consuming nature of the process,” said Clay Wilkes, Galileo CEO. “We developed Galileo Instant Issuing to put the power in innovators’ hands by dramatically decreasing the time needed to bring their digital payments solutions to life.”

By providing easy access to the building blocks of debit cards, Galileo Instant Issuing opens up new possibilities—and revenue opportunities—for a variety of use cases, including: 

• Fintechs—Realize your digital banking features by creating debit cards and bank accounts.

• Neobank or Challenger Banks—Create bank accounts and cards to demonstrate your digital banking account features to investors.

• Businesses with Gig Employees—Issue physical cards to instantly pay your hourly or daily employees.

• Payroll—Pay your 1099 employees faster by issuing debit cards and bank accounts.

• Merchants—Provide a better purchasing experience by issuing customer debit cards and bank accounts.

• Reimbursement/Business Expense Cards—Provide employees with your own card to handle business expenses and petty cash.

The Galileo Instant Issuing implementation process begins with the Galileo Dashboard, a new portal that provides easy access to Galileo’s sandbox test environment,  production environment (for approved accounts) and powerful suite of solution-building APIs. Businesses enter the Galileo Dashboard from the newly updated Galileo website, where they can begin the process of opening bank accounts and creating white-labeled cards.

“Galileo has created a powerful, time-saving innovation. By working with Galileo on Instant Issuing, Mastercard is providing yet another way for fintechs and other emerging companies to develop and launch innovative payment solutions quickly and easily,” said Jess Turner, executive vice president, Product and Innovation, North America, Mastercard. “This program will now be added to Mastercard Accelerate, and be one of the ways in which Mastercard will help new companies in the United States grow and scale.”