How to integrate a card product in Latinamerica easily

So, you’re looking to issue cards for your business and want to jump over the hassle and integrate easily…

We’ll assume you already have an idea of what you want this product to do for your business flows and revenue so we won’t focus on the whys and instead just focus on getting it done.

Well, if you’re planning on doing it all by yourself, unfortunately the answer is it’s not that easy.

Luckily, you don’t have to deal with the entire bureaucracy with banking partners and card brands. The common practice is to find providers for processing and issuing to take that burden from you. The easiest way to do it, however, is to use one provider that covers the entire process, so you can focus on building your product and engaging with customers.

Here you’ll find a step by step guide to do just that using PayCaddy as your provider.

Determine your tech expertise

First of all, does your company already provide a digital experience to the users who’ll be using the cards? Do you have a tech team?

We provide solutions for both tech savvy and non technical companies, but that is the first thing you need to figure out, this way you can choose the solution that best fits your needs.

The route to integrate as a non technical company is fairly straightforward with our Express solution:

• Define the product you want to launch: this will cover the specs of the card, an understanding of the target user, the features that need to be included and the overall operational flow that will be required to manage that product.
• Choose the design and printing methods: this will cover the design and materials of the card and also how the stock of unpersonalized cards will be managed. You can either preprint an factory made inventory of cards or choose an OnDemand modality to handle smaller printed inventories on the go.
• Brand the whitelabel app
• Get access to the Client Backoffice

If you’re building a Bespoke project, that means you control the cardholder UX/UI and require more granular control over the product, then you need to stick around a while longer, but no worries, our Restful API was built with simple flows in mind.

💡 If you have no tech experience at all this will probably be a bit too technical, share it with your tech team together with our Documentation, they will thank you later.

Integrate Essential Features

Everything from now on in this tutorial will happen on our QA environment first and once everything is tested and polished, our team would coordinate a production launch.

To start, you’ll need to interact with 3 entities in our core: Users, Wallets and Cards

You have endpoints to create and consult each of these.

First step is to integrate the creation of a User

A user is created with a Main Wallet associated to it right from the beginning.

You can link a card directly to it or create additional wallets for the same user.

Each wallet can be linked to multiple cards.

Creating a Card

To be able to create a card, first the user needs to be activated.

This is done by going through a KYC verification.

If you’re using our integrated solution to verify KYC information, whenever a user is created, our API provides a link for this user to undergo their verification.

We’ll send you webhook notifications declaring the result of a user’s verification. You’ll need to capture these webhooks to handle your user’s statuses on your cardholder app.

If you’re planning to capture the KYC data and make verifications on your end, you can discuss it with PayCaddy’s compliance team to request a delegated verification flow.

With an active user, you can now issue a card. You’ll simply need to send a request to our card creation endpoint with the userId and the walletId that the card is meant to be associated to.

You’ll also need to provide a product code that specifies what type of card will be issued and whether the card is Physical or only Virtual. The product code is provided by PayCaddy’s team after setting up the product on the definition step.

Managing a Card

Cool, you now have an active user with a card!

You might need to activate that card if it is a physical one, so we better get into the Card Operations:

The first card operation you’ll need to integrate is used exclusively for physical cards so if your project does not include that, you can skip this one.

Each physical card is initially created inactive, for security reasons, so for those types of cards, you’ll need to integrate our Acknowledge Reception endpoint to your cardholder app. This is meant to allow a cardholder to declare the card has been delivered so it can be activated for the first time.

Next, you’ll need to integrate the endpoints to give the cardholder control over their card’s self management:

• Check PAN to visualize the card’s number and expiration date.
• Check CVV to visualize the card’s CVV.
• Check PIN to visualize the card’s PIN.
• Unblock PIN to unblock the PIN once it’s been tried wrongly more than 3 times.
• Change PIN to allow cardholders to set their own 4 digit PIN.
• Block card to allow cardholders to make their cards inactive.
• Unblock card to allow cardholders to reinstate card activity.

You’ll need to make sure your app allows the cardholder to use these features easily and intuitively. No worries, we’ve set up a little bit of a guide for that too:

Cardholder App Front End Guidelines

Transactions

So far we’ve covered most of the experience of the cardholder, but we’re missing something crucial: transactions.

We notify each transaction via webhook and each one of their payloads carry 11 different data attributes to identify the card, describe the transaction and how it affects the wallet’s balance.

You’ll need to store that information to make it easily retrievable (and why not filterable 😉) for your cardholders directly from your UX/UI.

Funding Wallets

The last thing you’ll need to integrate is the Pay In and Transfer endpoints, basically how you introduce funds into a wallet.

If you’re implementing a credit backed card, PayCaddy’s team will assist you on the correct flows and endpoints to manage Credit Wallets. For now, we’ll focus on how to introduce funds in prefunded type wallets with the use of PayIns.

With a PayIn you declare the amount to be made available in a wallet and the currency of the target wallet and that triggers two things:

• First the money is made available in the wallet instantly - voilà!
• Secondly this PayIn and all other PayIns of the day are registered for daily settlement operations.

You’ll need to discuss with PayCaddy’s team the best flow to implement when using PayIns and Transfers to make sure it adapts well to your operation and allows for smooth treasury management.

Transferring Funds Between Wallets

The Transfer function simply moves funds from one wallet to another, your product might need it or it might not. It’s a good idea to integrate this functionality to your admin panel in any case so you can easily manage the funds in your program.

Transfers can be done between wallets of the same user or different users of your program as well, just make sure the currencies between the sending and receiving wallets match.

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There you go, if you’ve managed to do everything above, you have successfully integrated PayCaddy’s solution to launch a card product in LatAm. Next you’ll need to prepare for launching and managing your Card Issuing Program. Find resources in our Newsroom to learn about all the steps involved into a succesful card program in LatAm.

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