Card issuance

A card is a debit card — virtual or physical — that Mono provisions against one of your Banking accounts in partnership with Visa. Card issuance is the flow your business runs when you want to give an account holder a way to spend their balance at any Visa-enabled merchant directly from Mono, without requiring a separate transfer.

Use this flow for employee expense cards, prepaid customer cards, marketplace seller spending cards, or any case where an account holder needs a card credential tied to their Mono account.

Before you start

You will need:

• A Mono account with Banking (Cards) enabled and an API key. See Authentication.
• A Banking account already created to which the card will be linked.
• A webhook endpoint subscribed to card transaction events for spend activity after the card is issued.
• An idempotency key per card creation request to make retries safe.

Sequence overview

1. Request a card — your operator or application triggers card creation for a specific account holder and card type (virtual or physical).
2. Call Mono — your backend submits the card creation request with the account id, holder details, and an idempotency key.
3. Mono provisions with the card network — Mono requests credentials from Visa and receives a tokenized card number, expiry, and CVV.
4. Receive the card — Mono returns the card id and masked PAN synchronously. Virtual cards come back in active state and can be used immediately. Physical cards come back in created state and must be activated by the holder in the Mono app before they work.
5. Deliver to the holder — your backend surfaces the card details to the operator or account holder. For physical cards, also communicate the activation step.

Steps

The full step-by-step (with curl, Node.js, and Python examples for creation, PIN setting, and card controls) is pending. Until it is published, see:

• The card transactions webhook page for spend and authorization event payloads.
• Idempotency Keys for safe retries on creation requests.

Next steps

• PSE collection — accept payments into the account that funds the card.
• Banking webhooks — the events that track card lifecycle and spend activity.
• Sandbox — issue a test card without activating real card network credentials.