Yesterday, we had a meeting with Ilya Klinkin, CPO at Altery — a company building Cards-as-a-Service and Banking-as-a-Service solutions for other fintechs 🏦
Beyond the intro, we discussed the market, and a few points were worth highlighting separately.
📍 First, it was great to hear an external view on Performa. According to Ilya, our key competitive advantages are clear UX, a straightforward product, and transparent logic. In a crowded market, that is no longer just a nice bonus — it is real differentiation.
📍 Second, while it may seem that “everyone is selling cards” today, the reality is that there are still very few truly reliable card-issuing partners in Europe. And the market still lives in the shadow of very strong benchmarks from the past — especially the Binance Card, which at one point set such a high standard that many providers are still trying to position themselves against it. Some compare themselves to RedotPay, others to alternative issuers, but the benchmark remains extremely high.
At the same time, one of the biggest competitors to fintech card products today is centralized exchanges. Bybit, for example, is already operating in Europe through partnership models, and that is a meaningful signal for the market.
Another important insight from the conversation: if you model the P&L of a card business properly, even Visa / Mastercard principal membership can pay back within 2–3 years. And that
does not necessarily require a massive card base from day one. Yes, the preparation phase is long, operationally heavy, and infrastructure-intensive — but the model itself can still make economic sense.
And this is where the bigger question begins.
Are card products still alive for the next 3–5 years? Or is Visa / Mastercard principal membership increasingly a trend from the previous cycle? 🤔
My current view is that launching “just another card product” is no longer enough for new fintechs. Card solutions are already everywhere. What looks far more interesting to me now is the space around e-wallets, QR payments, and agentic commerce. That is where the next infrastructure layer is only starting to emerge — and where younger fintechs may still have room to build something the larger players have not fully captured yet.
What do you think — are cards still alive, or will the next wave be built somewhere else?
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