Prepaid programmes
Funds are loaded onto the card before spending. Settlement risk is contained by the prepaid balance. Common for gift cards, expense cards, payroll cards. Codego's white-label card platform handles prepaid out of the box.
A Bank Identification Number (BIN) is the first six to eight digits of a payment card number, identifying the issuing institution to the card scheme. BIN sponsorship is the arrangement under which a Visa or Mastercard Principal Member shares its BIN range with a third party — a fintech, a programme manager, a corporate — enabling that third party to issue cards on the scheme's rails without holding principal membership itself. This guide covers BIN sponsorship end-to-end.
A Bank Identification Number, abbreviated BIN, is the first six to eight digits of a payment-card primary account number (PAN). The BIN identifies the issuing institution to the card scheme — Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover — and routes authorisation requests, settlement files and chargebacks to the correct issuer. Without a BIN, no card can be issued; the BIN is the registered identity of the issuer in the scheme's directory.
Visa and Mastercard moved from six-digit to eight-digit BINs in 2022 to expand capacity. The International Organization for Standardization formalised this in ISO/IEC 7812. Each BIN is allocated to a scheme principal member, which is itself either a bank or a financial institution that has met the scheme's capital, operational and certification requirements.
A scheme principal member can use its allocated BIN ranges itself or share them with a sponsored programme manager. Under sponsorship, the principal member remains the legal issuer of record — its name appears on scheme statements, its capital backs the programme, its compliance team owns regulatory liability — while a third party operates the customer-facing programme: brand, product design, marketing, cardholder support.
The sponsorship contract typically covers six things:
Becoming a Visa or Mastercard principal member directly is structurally expensive. Visa requires capital reserves, scheme certification, operational infrastructure and ongoing dues that run into the millions of euros annually. Mastercard imposes similar requirements. Most fintechs do not have the capital, the runway or the strategic justification for principal membership — and they do not need it.
BIN sponsorship lets a fintech run a full Visa or Mastercard programme — issue cards, process transactions, manage cardholders — under a sponsor's principal membership. The fintech focuses on customer experience and product. The sponsor handles scheme compliance and the regulated layer. Codego's card-issuing platform ships BIN sponsorship across both Visa and Mastercard out of the box.
BIN sponsorship is priced on a mix of fixed and variable components. Setup fees cover programme certification, BIN allocation and integration. Monthly platform fees cover the operational infrastructure — typically several thousand euros per month at minimum. Per-transaction costs include scheme assessments, processor fees and the sponsor's margin. Interchange — the fee paid by the merchant's acquirer to the issuer — is the largest revenue line for the programme; the sponsor and the programme manager split it under terms set in the contract.
Public price lists are rare in this market. Pricing is volume-driven and negotiated. Total cost of ownership over three years matters more than headline rates: a sponsor with a higher monthly platform fee but lower per-transaction cost is the cheaper choice for high-volume programmes, and the reverse is true for low-volume programmes.
Funds are loaded onto the card before spending. Settlement risk is contained by the prepaid balance. Common for gift cards, expense cards, payroll cards. Codego's white-label card platform handles prepaid out of the box.
Cards are linked to a balance held at the issuer — typically an IBAN. Real-time authorisation against the account balance. Standard for neobank programmes.
Cards are backed by a credit line; cardholders spend now and repay later. Requires a banking licence to lend on balance sheet. Not all sponsors support credit.
Card numbers issued in software, no physical artefact. Common for online-only spending, expense management, single-use payments. Faster to issue (seconds rather than days) and cheaper to operate.
Cards backed by stablecoin or on-chain balances, with conversion to fiat at the point of authorisation. See Codego white-label crypto card.
Programmes for businesses — expense management, vendor payments, fleet cards, T&E. Often combine controls (merchant category restrictions, time windows) with detailed reporting.
Programmatic Visa and Mastercard issuing under Codego BIN sponsorship.
Branded prepaid, debit and virtual cards, live in around fifteen days.
The broader Banking-as-a-Service stack that BIN sponsorship sits inside.
Card issuing end-to-end including BIN sponsorship.