On 8 October, Wallester ran a live webinar on the part of card issuing that doesn’t always make slides: what it really takes to launch and scale a corporate card programme once the strategy is agreed.
Angelina Prokopenko, Marketing Project Management Team Lead at Wallester, hosted. She was joined by Karine Martinez (Head of Strategic Partnerships at Wallester), Alexey Reshko (COO of Transferra, an FCA-authorised EMI), and Georgi Prelovski (Senior Client Implementation Manager at Wallester), who made up the panel.
The full recording is already available. We have also selected a few moments that are really worth your time.
The business case is almost never “we need a card”
Karine Martinez deals with EMIs and fintechs every week, and her read on what they are really asking for set the tone.
“They rarely come to us saying, oh, I just need a card. That would be too simple and too basic, and usually there is a broader business problem behind it.” Launching a new proposition quickly, adding cards to an existing product, entering new markets, or replacing a fragmented setup. What has changed over five years, she said, is sophistication. Before, clients would ask whether you could issue cards. “Today, it’s really how quickly they can launch,” she said, with the economics at scale now part of the conversation too.
The “three months” that wasn’t
The heart of the session was Alexey Reshko, who walked everyone through Transferra’s own build-versus-buy decision in detail. The EMI considered and started three journeys at once: going direct to Visa and Mastercard for principal membership, BIN sponsorship, and white-label solution.
The direct route looked quick on paper. Going straight to the schemes, Alexey thought, would “take us, probably, some 3 to 6 months.” But the reality was a 12-to-15-month programme stitching together processing platforms, card bureaus, fraud tools and more, against a team that had maybe three hours a week to spend on it. His line on that gap between estimate and reality is the one to watch for:
“Push those three months into three hours that you actually have within the week to focus on this project.”
Transferra chose white-label path, keeping the option to scale onto its own BIN if the need arose, and a route to going direct to the schemes after that if everything went well. Four years on? “It’s still just a white-label program, and we are totally happy with that.”
What implementation looks like from the inside
Georgi covered the practical side: a kickoff call to lock scope, a project plan, and the partner’s technical team starting API integration straight away. On corporate controls, he laid out how much sits in the API, spending limits per card or account, merchant and country restrictions, ATM and contactless controls, and where the line falls between Wallester’s platform and the partner’s own governance layer for approval rules.
His advice for anyone earlier in the process is simple: decide the product before implementation starts. Markets, target users, currencies, virtual or physical cards, funding model. “Before implementation, decide the product. And during the implementation, build and prepare for the launch.”
On AI in compliance
Asked how AI fits into AML, Karine was direct about the limits. Automation flags the cases, but “behind the processes and behind the automation, they are humans, they are people.” Her own test, as someone in the cards industry: “I would never ever give my credentials to AI, to a conversational AI.” Useful for tooling, not a replacement for the expert who decides whether a flag is a false positive or a real case.
If scaling into more complex corporate clients is on your roadmap, the full conversation is definitely worth watching. And if you want to know more about white-label programmes or get in touch with us, our team is always available.
