Business U Card

Who the U Card program is for

U Card is a physical card program for overseas registered companies, opened in batches and by invitation. Three kinds of applicant are typical.

Distribution businesses with an established end-user base that need to apply for and manage a batch of physical cards under the company name, keeping central control of card status, limits and statements. What matters to them is bulk management in the console, not the features of any single card.

Distributed teams and travel spending: allocating company funds across multiple cardholders while keeping limits and consolidated statements. Compared with reimbursing after the fact, a prepaid physical card means spending happens inside the budget rather than being reviewed once it has already happened.

Platform businesses offering physical cards to their own merchants or partners as a value-added service. These have the strictest requirements around permissions and responsibility: who may request a card, who may freeze one, and who can see which statements must all be distinct in the system. We are equally direct about what does not fit: individual applications, bulk requests whose purpose cannot be explained, and companies without an overseas entity are outside this program. U Card is a standalone physical-card program, not a payout sub-feature.

About the 200-card minimum

Physical cards involve manufacturing, logistics and cardholder compliance, and each batch carries fixed cost and review effort regardless of size. The 200-card minimum is not a gatekeeping exercise; it is the smallest batch at which the process is viable on both cost and compliance.

It has a useful side effect: an applicant has to decide in advance who the cards are for and what they will be used for. That is precisely the first question in our review, and the one that determines how quickly it goes — a clear answer usually passes quickly, a vague one leads to repeated rounds.

After a batch is confirmed the timeline runs: business review, purpose and use-case confirmation, cardholder document collection and KYC, then manufacturing and delivery. The least compressible stage is cardholder documents, and it depends on the applicant’s own organisation — getting two hundred people to submit identification is not something technology can speed up.

What the review asks

The business review uses the same KYB pack as the stablecoin side: incorporation documents, an ownership chart down to natural persons, identification for directors and beneficial owners, address and bank evidence, and a business description. The checklist is published in our KYB guide, and one pack serves both programs. Beyond the standard documents, the card program confirms three further things.

• Who the cards are for — employees, partners or end users, each of which implies a different compliance arrangement.
• What they will be used for — spending categories and expected regions.
• Where the funds come from, and whether that is consistent with your core business.

Full-lifecycle management

Issuing the cards is where the work starts. The U Card console covers what running a program actually requires.

• Card status: activate, freeze and unfreeze per card, with every change recorded. Departures, lost cards and unusual spending all need a freeze within minutes — not a support ticket and a wait.
• Limits and balances: available balance and funding history per card. In a prepaid model the balance is the ceiling on risk.
• Transactions: per-transaction records, viewable and exportable by card and by period, ready for your finance process.
• Cardholders: the binding between people and cards, so staffing changes can be handled properly.