With the right virtual card issuing API, you can transform your customer loyalty, employee rewards, and sales incentives programs to deliver more value for you and your stakeholders.
The convenience (no need to carry cards around), improved security (cannot be lost or stolen), immediacy (can be created immediately), spending controls (easy to impose spending limits), and lower production costs (no card printing or shipping fees) that virtual cards offer have made them a preferred option over physical card payments in some quarters.
No wonder then that the virtual card market (including debit and credit cards) was valued at $281.22 billion in 2021 by Allied Market Research and it is expected to grow by 21.3% CAGR to become a $1.89 trillion industry by 2031.
To enjoy these benefits, you need a virtual card issuing API that provides the following features:
- Branding and customisation
- Versatility
- Global usage
- Fraud prevention
- Spending controls
- Reporting capabilities
- Easy and quick integration
By providing these features, and many more, Berkeley Payment ensures that you can maximise the benefits of virtual cards while minimising the risk.
In this article, we consider how Berkeley Payment provides these features (and benefits) and how you can easily and quickly integrate the API into your system.
Why you should choose Berkeley Payment’s virtual card issuing API
Before we go through the 7 simple steps of integrating Berkeley Payment’s API, let’s focus on the features that this API provides and why they are important to you.
1. Branding and customisation
Berkeley Payment offers white-label prepaid cards instead of generic ones.
This means that you can customise your virtual cards with your brand’s design elements so that each card communicates your brand.
With this branding, users of your virtual cards will always be reminded that they are using your card and not just another generic one. This can help to improve brand image and awareness and strengthen relationships with customers, employees, and other stakeholders.
At Berkeley Payment, we provide 300 customizable features that you can use to personalise your virtual cards.
2. Versatility
With Berkeley Payment, you can create virtual cards for a variety of purposes – wages or salary payment, employee rewards, sales incentives, customer loyalty, expenses management, among others.
Also, you can choose to make a virtual card reloadable or non-reloadable. A reloadable virtual card can be used for programs that are recurring (e.g, a payroll card) and non-reloadable virtual cards can be used for one-off programs (e.g, customer loyalty programs).
3. Global usage
We provide only MasterCard or Visa cards in a bid to ensure that our virtual cards can be used for global payments. Are your employees, customers, and sales reps outside of North America? No need to worry; they are covered.
Furthermore, our virtual cards can be used for offline and online payments. Regarding the former, our virtual cards can be tokenized and added to mobile wallets like Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay. With this, you can use them to make payments at the point of sale (POS) in physical stores that allow contactless payments.
4. Fraud prevention
Virtual cards are safer than physical cards, which can be lost or stolen. Nevertheless, virtual card numbers can still be leaked during a data breach.
To prevent this, Berkeley Payment uses multi-tenant architecture, PCI certification, encryption, and automated payment activity review to protect you from cyberattacks.
5. Spending controls
You can manage your virtual cards centrally from our platform. Card production can be done quickly and active cards can be easily deactivated if you notice any irregularities.
Furthermore, you can set spending limits on the cards you create and monitor expenses to ensure card holders are in line. This is useful in the case of employee expenses cards (cards that employees use to purchase goods and services on behalf of the company) where accountability is important.
6. Reporting capabilities
The only way to improve your reward programs is to get enough data that will help you decide if you need to make changes.
At Berkeley Payment, we provide you regular updates about each card program you have created. These updates will also help when you are setting budgets for your programs.
7. Easy and quick integration
As will become obvious in the next section, we have streamlined our integration process to make it seamless and quick.
How to integrate Berkeley Payment’s Virtual Card Issuing API
Below are the 7 simple steps to get started:
1. Requesting authentication
The API integration will take place through the following base URLs:
- Staging environment: <https://api.staging.pungle.co>
- Production environment: <https://api.pungle.io>
Once you have completed the onboarding process, you will get all the information you need to access the base URLs and start the integration process.
During the integration process, you will need to get both private and public keys (tokens) that you will use for authentication at different stages.
Below is a sample of a user’s dashboard showing the keys that have been generated:
2. Creating and issuing virtual cards
You will need to access the Card Issuing endpoint through a POST request (using JSON) to start creating cards.
Creating cardholders
To create a virtual card, you will need to create a cardholder account. This can be done by going through the cardholders section from the Card Issuing endpoint, as shown below:
While creating a cardholder, you can specify the card program (sales incentives rewards or expense management, for example).
Below is a sample of a list of cardholders created by a user:
Verification of cardholders
As part of our commitment to your security, we will go through a detailed CPI/KYC process to verify a cardholder. This process must be completed before you can attach virtual cards to a cardholder.
Below is a workflow showing what this process looks like:
Creating cards
After creating and verifying cardholders, you can continue on to create and activate a new card.
Virtual cards can be activated with the last four digits of the card number using the Modify Account Status endpoint.
Creating card pins
Virtual cards will also need a PIN that the cardholder will use when making payments. They can create this in one of the following three ways:
- IVR: They can set the pin by calling an automated phone system.
- CSR: Alternatively, they can call customer care.
- API: Pins can also be set and modified via the API.
Managing cards
This is where you can deactivate a virtual card for security reasons.
3. Setting up financial and external accounts
A financial account is an account created within Berkeley Payment that is associated with a card holder. It’s like a wallet for cardholders.
Cardholders can have one account and multiple virtual cards and they can also have multiple accounts.
All the details about a cardholder – including personal details like name and email, all the accounts associated with them, and all the cards that have been created for them – can be accessed through the Cardholder details page.
This page can be accessed by going to the Card Issuing endpoint and selecting cardholders, as shown below:
External accounts are demand deposit bank accounts created by financial institutions and fintech providers outside of Berkeley Payment.
4. Loading virtual cards
To make a direct deposit into any of the accounts and cards you have created, you have to create a value load.
For virtual cards, this will be done by accessing the account you want to credit through the Card Issuing endpoint.
Below is an example of a value load created by one of our users:
This functionality also allows you to set spending limits for any of the financial accounts. Remember that this can come in handy for accounts and cards created for employee expenses.
If you have any reason to remove money from a financial account, then you can reverse this process by creating a value unload.
5. Card to card and external transfers
Card to card transfer is the movement of funds from one cardholder to another cardholder within the Berkeley Payment system.
Funds can also be transferred from a cardholder to an external account, what is called an external transfer.
Both transfers can be accessed through the Card Issuing endpoint.
6. Transferring money with DirectSend
Instead of going through the Card Issuing endpoint, you can also make disbursements to financial accounts through the DirectSend endpoint.
DirectSend is a real-time payment mechanism on Berkeley Payment. Transfers can be completed within 30 minutes and you will be provided with regular updates on the status of the transfer.
Below is an example of a transfer done through the DirectSend endpoint.
Just like the value load and value unload under the Card Issuance endpoint, there are two use cases for DirectSend:
- Pull transactions: A pull transaction debits a particular amount from a financial account.
- Push transactions: A push transaction credits a financial account with a specific amount.
7. Accessing reports
You can get detailed reports about the transactions you have done through the Transactions endpoint.
For transactions done through DirectSend, you can get detailed reports via the DirectSend endpoint. An example is shown below:
[For more technical information on how to integrate our virtual card issuing API, please read our API docs. There you will also find user guides, tutorials, and answers to FAQs]
Transform your rewards programs with Berkeley Payment’s white label virtual cards
The ease and speed with which you can integrate our API is the beginning of the benefits you can enjoy by creating virtual debit cards with Berkeley Payment.
If you want to transform your rewards programs to make them more valuable to you and the recipients, then you will find the branding and customisation, fraud prevention, global usage, spending controls and reporting capabilities that we offer essential.
For over 17 years, we have worked with companies with different business models operating in various industries, creating whitelabel virtual cards for a variety of purposes.
Our aim is to provide you with exactly what you need to get more value from the money you spend on rewards programs.
[Are you ready to create virtual cards that will help improve results for your rewards or incentives programs? Register on Berkeley Payment and start integrating our API.]
