Digital payments startup Marqeta launched a portfolio of seven banking products Monday under the moniker Marqeta for Banking, its largest-ever product expansion.

“Today, when you think about banking, your own personal finance, you keep constantly moving between different [tools],” the company’s chief technology officer, Randy Kern, told Banking Dive at the Money20/20 conference in Las Vegas. “Whether it’s your bank, whether it’s a bill that you’re going to pay, you have to interact in so many different systems. They’re all disjointed. But it’s my money. It’s my own personal financial world. One of the things that a lot of our customers are trying to innovate on is a much more holistic experience in context of whatever you're doing.”

Marqeta for Banking includes new demand deposit accounts, which gives nonbanks the ability to hold money in accounts like traditional institutions can; direct deposit with early pay, which allows customers to receive their funds up to two days early and lets banks decide eligibility for early pay on a user-by-user basis; and Automated Clearing House (ACH) payments with Plaid integration, which uses Marqeta’s longtime partnership with Plaid to verify external accounts during interbank payments and allows them to happen more quickly than traditional ACH payments.

Two more solutions, cash loads and fee-free ATMs, allow customers to more easily dispense and take in money to and from the end user at 85,000 ATMs and 180,000 retail banking locations, respectively.

Marqeta for Banking will release two additional solutions — bill pay and instant funding — in beta next year. End users will be able to pay their bills from a growing directory of companies without having to switch out of their banking app. They’ll also be able to immediately fund their white-labeled Marqeta accounts — which could provide unique benefits such as Bitcoin rewards — with funds paid via debit from their traditional bank accounts.

Rather than waiting for funds to arrive through ACH payments, Marqeta customers using instant funding can spend money at account onboarding, which will be “a huge differentiator,” said Raul Leyva, Marqeta’s director of product management.

“We brought a level of innovation and speed to [money movement],” Kern said. “Why on earth did we sit around and wait for money to move? It’s ridiculous.”

More than one-quarter of customers who use a traditional financial institution as their primary bank also have an account with a digital bank, according to Marqeta’s 2022 Consumer Money Movement Report.

“Consumers increasingly expect their financial services to be digital-first and mobile-friendly, delivered by a brand they trust,” Marqeta CEO Jason Gardner said at Money20/20. “This is especially true for a rising generation of consumers who are less likely to have visited a physical bank branch or use a plastic card, and will instead begin their banking relationship on a mobile phone, which is doubling as a payment tool.”

Marqeta for Banking, he said, is “fully designed to help customers meet the needs of today’s changing behaviors while building products for tomorrow’s consumer.”

Marqeta’s partners include neobanks, nonbanks and traditional banks like JPMorgan and First National Bank of Omaha.

Simon Khalaf, Marqeta’s chief product officer, said the company’s expansion into banking services “opens up new use cases” for its customers and “helps them build virtual banking solutions that provide more instant access to finances and can be embedded into apps consumers love.”

“Integrating our modern card issuing with Marqeta for Banking’s feature set, we see as key to catalyzing the flywheel of engagement across the entire cardholder journey by integrating our existing platform with new money movement features,” he said.

By Gabrielle Saulsbery on Oct 25, 2022
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