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The vendor stack behind a stablecoin fintech. I spent a week mapping what sits behind a stablecoin card product. Here's the map, in the order you have to solve it. 1. Your licence Nothing downstream works until you answer this. You need permission to move fiat, hold client money and permission to touch crypto. Those are usually two licences from two regulators: UAE. A CBUAE PTSR licence if you're touching payment tokens at all. It covers the whole country except DIFC and ADGM so add VARA for Dubai, FSRA for ADGM, or DFSA for DIFC depending on where you sit. These stack, they don't substitute. Singapore. Major Payment Institution licence under the Payment Services Act for the fiat side plus a Digital Payment Token service licence for the crypto side. EU. EMI authorisation to hold client money and issue IBANs, plus MiCA CASP authorisation for crypto services. Issuing a euro stablecoin adds EMT issuer authorisation on top. UK. An EMI or Authorised Payment Institution licence for the fiat side. For crypto, today you only register with the FCA under the money laundering rules which is a compliance registration rather than a licence. Full authorisation replaces it under rules published on 30 June 2026, with applications open from 30 September 2026 and the regime live from 25 October 2027. Hong Kong. SFC VATP licence to run a trading venue, HKMA licence under the Stablecoins Ordinance to issue one. US. Money transmitter licences state by state, a NYDFS BitLicense on top if you serve New York and permitted payment stablecoin issuer status under the GENIUS Act if you're issuing. 2. Sponsor bank If your customers need named accounts, you need a bank to provide them. The bank holds the deposit, its licence is the one that matters and its risk appetite decides whether you exist. Banks with a crypto client on the public record: - Lead Bank (US): Bridge, BVNK, Noah, Fold - Cross River (US): Circle's settlement partner since March 2023 - Customers Bank (US): its CBIT token runs 24/7 USD settlement between crypto firms; Circle, Coinbase and BitGo named. - Western Alliance (US): launched VenueX in July 2026 as an always-on institutional liquidity hub, Coinbase named - ClearBank (UK/EU): has run Coinbase's UK GBP accounts since 2019, added Bybit EU in June 2026 - Solaris (Germany): Bitpanda - Sygnum, AMINA, InCore (Switzerland and Liechtenstein): full crypto banks Two things worth knowing here. Concentration is real and Lead Bank in particular sits behind a large slice of the US stablecoin stack so ask any sponsor who else is on their platform before you sign. 3. Payment connectivity Pick your corridors before you pick your accounts. Every rail is tied to one currency and one jurisdiction and runs on its own identifier, so which account you hold determines which rails you can reach. - An IBAN gets you SEPA and can be quoted on a SWIFT wire. - To receive USD over ACH, your user needs a US account number and a nine-digit ABA routing number. An IBAN cannot receive ACH at all. - UK Faster Payments needs a sort code and an eight-digit account number. - Local currency inside a country means a locally licensed account. AED IBANs come only from CBUAE-licensed banks and the domestic rails won't accept a foreign IBAN at all. - Europe is the exception and it was built that way. One IBAN reaches 36 SEPA countries. Pick your corridors first, then work backwards to the accounts you need. If you don't want a licensed entity in every market, you rent virtual IBANs from Fiat Republic, OpenPayd, Banking Circle or Nium. One catch: a virtual IBAN sits under the provider's master account rather than your customer's name and some banks, payroll systems and government payers reject them for exactly that reason. 4. Custody If you're holding digital assets on your users' behalf, you need a licensed custody partner. @FireblocksHQ , @BitGo , @Anchorage and Copper cover most of the market. In the UAE, @Hex_Trust and Komainu both hold full VARA licences, and @Official_Zand runs institutional custody onshore. 5. Wallet infrastructure You need this the moment every user gets their own on-chain address instead of a row in your internal database. It's the software that creates a key per user, secures it, and recovers it when they lose their phone. It also decides whether your product is custodial, which decides your licence, so this is a call to make before you write a compliance policy. @privy_io (now Stripe), @turnkeyhq , Dfns, Portal, Crossmint, Circle Wallets, Safe. 6. On-ramp and off-ramp The on-ramp turns your user's card payment or bank transfer into stablecoins. The off-ramp reverses it, sending money back to an account that same user owns. @Transak , @moonpay , @tryramp , Banxa and Mercuryo are the main names, with aggregators like @GetOnramper sitting across several at once. Decide your target markets before you pick a partner. Coverage is the whole game at this layer and it varies enormously by country, by payment method, and by whether the provider actually holds a licence there. 7. Stablecoin orchestration Routing means deciding, for each payment, which chain to move on, which stablecoin to hold, whether to convert and which fiat rail to exit through. A payment from a US business to a Mexican supplier might arrive over ACH, convert to USDC, travel on Base because it's cheap, convert again and land over SPEI. Something has to make those choices, hold balances at both ends, and give you one API instead of six integrations. @Stablecoin , @BVNKFinance , @zerohashx , @conduitxyz 8. Payout networks This looks identical to the off-ramp until you notice who's receiving the money. An off-ramp pays your user their own funds. A payout network pays somebody your business owes: a contractor, a supplier, a marketplace seller, a remittance recipient. The rails underneath are frequently the same and several vendors sell both but the obligation differs because paying third parties at scale means screening every recipient rather than onboarding one customer. It also reaches places a bank transfer doesn't, like mobile money in Kenya, cash pickup in the Philippines, and local wallets across Latin America. @dLocalPayments , @ThunesPayments, Yellow Card, Bitso Business, @coinsph. 9. FX and liquidity You need this whenever the currency going in differs from the currency coming out. Someone has to turn AED into PKR and someone has to carry the risk that the rate moves between the moment you quote it and the moment you settle. Two jobs sit in this layer. The OTC desk is who you buy currency or stablecoins from in size without moving the price, which means @B2C2Group, @FalconXGlobal , @keyrock or OKX. Then there's the funding decision. Pre-fund and you park capital in every destination market so payouts land instantly, which is fast and expensive. Convert at the moment of payment, and you free the capital but wear the delay and the rate. That single choice sets your working capital requirement and plenty of founders treat it as a technical detail right up until the CFO asks why four million dollars is sitting in Nairobi. 10. Cards This is where the vendor count gets underestimated most. A working card programme is six jobs and one company rarely does all of them. - Network membership. Visa and Mastercard are the rulebook everyone plugs into. A principal member connects directly and can issue in its own name, while everyone else rides on a member's connection. @raincards, @reapglobal, @wirexapp. - BIN sponsor. The licensed bank whose BIN sits on the card and who carries settlement and compliance liability to the network. In crypto this is increasingly the infrastructure company itself rather than a bank, which is the biggest structural change in the category. - Issuer processor. The system that says approved or declined in real time, checks the balance, and passes the message to the network in milliseconds. Marqeta, Thredd, Paymentology, Enfuce, Highnote, Lithic. - Program manager. Whoever runs it day to day: product rules, support, fraud policy, dispute handling, and coordinating every other vendor on this list. @KulipaXYZ , Baanx, Wirex, or you. - Card operations. The parts that never appear in a pitch deck. 3-D Secure for online authentication, mandatory under PSD2 in Europe. Provisioning into Apple Pay and Google Pay, which the networks tokenise through Visa Token Service and Mastercard MDES. Disputes and chargebacks through Verifi or Ethoca. PCI DSS scope, which you shrink by making sure a raw card number never touches your servers. And physical manufacturing through IDEMIA, Thales, G+D or CompoSecure. - Settlement. How you actually pay the network. Traditionally a wire on business days which means posting collateral against the gap. Visa went live with USDC settlement in the US in December 2025 with Cross River and Lead Bank and Mastercard expanded to five stablecoins across eight chains in June 2026. NymCard became the first issuer in the GCC to settle with Visa in USDC in February 2026. A shorter settlement window means less capital parked as a buffer. 11. Yield Both the GENIUS Act in the US and MiCA in the EU ban stablecoin issuers from paying yield to holders. So the yield moved somewhere else, and every earn feature you've used is a workaround built on one of three patterns. - Route it through a lending protocol. Coinbase lends your USDC through @Morpho vaults curated by @SteakhouseFi, live since September 2025. Kraken's DeFi Earn runs on @veda_labs vaults across 48 US states, Canada and the EEA, live since January 2026. @ether_fi lets you spend against staked collateral by borrowing against it instead of selling it, and is moving that credit book onto Aave V4. - Buy tokenised treasuries. KAST's USD Prime vault pays up to 3.3%, backed 1:1 by US Treasuries through @m0. @opentrade_io sells the same thing as a service, powering interest-bearing USD accounts for Littio in Colombia and Criptan in Spain. - Rent the whole layer. @blend_money gives every user their own isolated on-chain account and routes balances across Morpho, Aave, Compound, Spark and Pendle. @ground_onchain does something similar over tokenised assets. 12. Compliance Six separate functions, usually six separate vendors. - KYC verifies that an individual is who they claim to be. KYB verifies a business, which is harder, because you have to confirm the entity exists, identify its representatives, and screen every beneficial owner above 25%. @sumsub, Persona, Veriff, Trulioo, Alloy. - KYT checks whether a wallet address carries a history you don't want on your platform. @chainalysis, @elliptic , @trmlabs, @CrystalPlatform. - AML monitoring watches behaviour over time instead of checking once at signup. @ComplyAdvantage, Unit21, @sardine. - Sanctions and PEP screening runs names against OFAC, UN, EU and UK lists, at onboarding and continuously afterwards. - Travel Rule obliges you to pass sender and receiver details to the counterparty VASP above a threshold. @notabene_id, @sumsub, Sygna. Nobody has converged on a single protocol, so most firms end up running more than one to reach everybody. 13. Security and assurance - Smart contract audits before anything touches mainnet. The firms with real track records in stablecoins and payments: @trailofbits of Bits, @zellic_io, @cantinasecurity, @spearbit and @HalbornSecurity - Runtime monitoring after launch, because an audit is a snapshot of one day. @HypernativeLabs, @blockaid_, @hexagate_. - Insurance and certifications. Crime and custody cover through Coincover, Evertas or a Lloyd's syndicate. Then SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS if you touch card data. Start SOC 2 early, because the observation window runs six to twelve months and it silently blocks enterprise deals you haven't opened yet. Everybody is trying to sell you more of the list Read the layers again and you'll see the same companies showing up in three or four of them. That's deliberate. Selling one layer makes you a supplier, selling five makes you the platform and every vendor here is climbing. Stripe owns Bridge (orchestration, issuance, cards) and Privy (wallet infrastructure), with Stripe Issuing on top. Payward, Kraken's parent, closed its acquisition of REAP on 1 July 2026 and agreed to buy Magic Labs' wallet business on 27 July, a platform behind more than 60 million wallets and over $10B in stablecoin volume. Cards, wallets and an exchange in one house. Mastercard closed BVNK on 3 August 2026, buying orchestration and licences while already being the network. Fireblocks bought Dynamic in October 2025, adding wallet infrastructure to custody, then launched Fireblocks Earn in April 2026, adding yield. Chainalysis bought Hexagate in December 2024 and Alterya in January 2025, extending from analytics into monitoring and fraud. Wirex holds both network memberships, runs its own processing, and since November 2025 has sold the whole stack as BaaS to Utorg, BingX, Send and Lobstr. You can compress a dozen contracts into three or four and for most teams starting today that's the right call. What you give up is the ability to replace one layer without rebuilding around it and the assurance that your infrastructure provider isn't also your competitor. Payward runs Krak and a Kraken card while owning REAP. Exodus runs a wallet while owning MetaMask's card infrastructure. None of that is misconduct and information barriers are standard but it's a dependency you want priced into change-of-control and BIN portability terms before you sign rather than after.

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