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Lithic Product Update: February 2024
This edition of Lithic’s product newsletter covers:
- NY Open Bar Happy Hour 🍸
- The New Generation of Issuer Processing 💳
- Recent Product Launches and Updates 🚀
- Open Roles 🤩
- New Podcasts 🎧
- Other News 🎉
Want to get in touch? Contact us.
NY Open Bar Happy Hour 🍸
If you’ll be in NY and want to connect with other fintech folks, we’re co-hosting a happy hour with Ingo Payments at Keens Steakhouse on Wednesday, February 28. There’ll be an open bar and hors d'oeuvres. You can RSVP here.
The New Generation of Issuer Processing 💳
Like many business models, card issuer processing has gone through change and growth over the years. The best way to think about the changes is that there have been three “generations” of issuer processors:
- Legacy core banking providers – built for and distributed only through traditional banks.
- Non-bank oriented issuing platforms – these bundle card program management services and were the first forays into card issuing that can support nonbank fintechs.
- Developer-first issuer processors – like Lithic, these are purpose-built platforms that give card programs high levels of observability, control, and flexibility, and have unlocked a new wave of card issuing innovation.
There are some unexpected concrete examples of how observability, control, and flexibility matter for anyone that wants to issue cards today. You can find out what they look like by reading the recent blog by Nikil Konduru, Lithic’s GM of Startups, on Developer-First Issuer Processing.
Lithic Product Updates 🚀
We’ve made a host of product improvements to better support and enable your card program. Here’s a round up of everything we’ve shipped since the last product newsletter.
Card Renewals, Replacements, and ABU
We’ve released new API endpoints that enable card programs to more intuitively replace and renew physical cards. Replacing a physical card is recommended in lost or stolen card cases, while renewing is recommended when a card is approaching its expiration date.
Additionally, when these endpoints are used on Mastercard programs, the card’s new details will flow through to Mastercard’s Automatic Billing Updater (ABU), which automatically updates cards on file with participating merchants.
All of that means cardholders can have a more seamless experience when getting an existing physical card replaced or renewed, and will not need to manually update their card details on file with participating ABU merchants. Read about it in our changelog.
Detailed Results in Transactions
We’ve added a field to the transaction object that gives card programs much more data granularity and visibility into why a transaction is declined. For example, this new field will let card programs see which type of account spend limit was exceeded (daily, monthly, lifetime) that caused the transaction to be declined, or that the card used in the transaction has expired.
Access to this data will help card programs self-serve and better understand authorization behavior. Customer support teams, for example, can now quickly respond to cardholder inquiries about declined transactions with more information at their fingertips.
You can read more in our changelog.
Multi-Program Support in Dashboard
We’ve added the ability to manage multiple card programs from our dashboard. As the Lithic platform and our customers have grown, some customers have added on new card programs as they’ve expanded their own businesses (e.g., launched with a debit card program, then added on a credit card program).
With this new functionality, customers with multiple programs can manage all of their programs with a single dashboard login, invite team members to manage one or more programs, and create new programs.
ASA Retries
We made further improvements to our retry mechanism for our Auth Stream Access (ASA) product. This allows our customers to minimize the number of unnecessary card declines due to connectivity issues between their systems and the Lithic platform, and ensure smooth cardholder experiences.
Previously, the Lithic platform would not retry ASA requests if the network connection was interrupted during request processing. With this enhancement, we will now resend an ASA request if the initial attempt fails due to network connectivity issues or we receive an HTTP status of 5xx.
You can read more in our changelog.
Greater Data Granularity in the Settlement API
In order to provide increased visibility into and more robust analysis of settlement activity, we’ve added more granular data to our Settlement API.
This additional granularity allows users to simplify their reconciliation workflows by being able to now differentiate between various settlement types such as:
- Various phases of the disputes lifecycle: chargeback, representment, prearbitration, and arbitration
- On single message transactions, settlement amounts from cardholder purchases vs. non-financial events that incur fees (e.g., balance checks)
You can read more in our changelog.
Apple Pay Visa Push Provisioning
Lithic now supports push provisioning for Apple Pay on Visa cards. This allows card programs issuing on Visa to enhance and simplify the digital wallet provisioning process for their cardholders by linking out directly from a mobile application to Apple Pay in order to add their cards to the wallet (vs. requiring cardholders to enter card information into Apple Pay directly).
Multiple Operating Accounts
For programs using our Accounts product suite, we currently provision issuing, reserve, and operating accounts at various entity levels (e.g., program-level or account holder-level) in order to support the operations of various use cases such as corporative incentives and bill pay.
We’ve now added support for multiple operating accounts at each entity level in order to support highly customized money movement and reconciliation needs. As an example, programs running accounts receivable operations can create multiple operating accounts for each of their customers (or invoices).
By isolating payment flows via separated operating accounts these programs can more easily trace and audit payment trails, and improve security by limiting the funds that may be in a given account.
Card API Improvements
We’ve updated our API to give users programmatic access to key configurations on their card programs. With the availability of this data, users will no longer need to store the mapping of these configurations in their databases, and are able to access this data directly as part of their integration to the Lithic platform:
- We added List Card Programs and Get Card Program endpoints that return details such as when the card program was created and details about the account range on which cards are issued.
- We added List Digital Card Art and Get Digital Card Art endpoints that return details such as which card program the card art is associated with, a description of the card art, and on which networks the card art is enabled.
- We added the card program token, account token, digital card art token, and product ID (i.e., the physical card configuration) to all Card API responses
Open Roles 🤩
We currently have a host of roles open, including:
New Podcasts 🎧
Jas Randhawa, founder of the fintech risk and compliance consultancy StrategyBRIX, joined us to talk about the current bank sponsor scrutiny, his lessons from leading financial crime functions at Stripe and Airwallex, and much more. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Other News 🎉
Lithic was named as one to the 2024 Fintech Innovation 50, the annual list launched by GGV Capital U.S. in partnership with Crunchbase, to recognize the most promising fintech companies in the eyes of startup investors.
Want to get in touch? Contact us.
