Lithic Legal Library: Free Legal Templates for Card Programs
Today we’re launching the Lithic Legal Library — a repository of legal and compliance templates, based on best practices for card programs. The library is open and free for all companies to use and includes templates for key policies, agreements, and disclosures.
After working with many fintech founders to build and launch their card programs, it’s clear that getting these legal policies and terms in place is much harder and more expensive than it needs to be.
Every fintech doing business in the U.S. should have access to quality legal and compliance documents, whether they work with Lithic or not. Legal documents aren’t business differentiators and shouldn’t be treated as intellectual property or trade secrets.
We believe making these documents publicly available strengthens the entire fintech community.
Visit our Legal Library to access the templates.
What forms does the library include?
We developed an initial batch of 15 documents and plan to expand the collection to cover more key policies that U.S. bank sponsors expect fintechs to have in place before launching new products.
Current documents include:
- AML and Sanctions Policy
- Servicing and Collections Policy
- Prepaid Cardholder Agreement
- Authorized User Agreement
- Chargebacks and Disputes Policy
And many more. You can check out the full library here.
Why we launched this library
We’ve been in your shoes before. New to payments, lending, or crypto. Needing to master a steep learning curve, and not sure where to start. When we built Privacy.com we had to figure it out the hard way. APIs and cloud hosting weren’t readily available. Neither were basics like compliance guides, policies, and procedures, or cardholder agreements.
Inspired by Y Combinator’s library for standard SAFE agreements, we set out to do the same for the fintech industry. Our goals for this library are to:
- Help companies launch more quickly.
- Commoditize paperwork that doesn’t have any proprietary or strategic advantages.
- Set the bar for what good legal forms look like.
Anything you pull from our library should get your legal and compliance program a B- range grade with minimal adaptation, and you can get to an A+ grade range with some additional effort and tailoring.
These templates are based on our own in-house documents that we developed for Privacy.com, and have been pressure tested by our in-house compliance experts and bank partners.
How to use the legal library
To help you get the most out of the templates, we’ve added guidance in our documentation and included footnotes and prompts within each of the templates.
Since this is coming in part from our legal team, we feel compelled to remind you that each company and product has unique considerations and these forms are not designed to replace specific legal advice.
We encourage you to have your own lawyer or compliance consultants review these templates to determine how you may need to tailor them.
Join us for a live walkthrough
We’ll be hosting a webinar on June 9, 2022 at 11 am PT to walk through the forms and answer any questions that you may have about operationalizing all these documents.
You can register for the webinar here.
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We hope these sample documents help you move faster and get back to focusing on your core business. If you’re interested in learning more about how to build out a card program, contact us!
