Credit cards are useful financial tools that let you borrow money on demand from a line of credit. Most credit cards are issued by large lenders or established financial institutions with experience in lending.
In recent years, a new type of financial company, the fintech company, has become more popular. These companies often offer cards with unique and valuable benefits, and they're worth looking into if you run a business or want a new personal credit card.
What Is a Fintech Credit Card?
To understand what a fintech credit card is, you first need to know what a fintech company is.
Fintech businesses combine finance and technology. These companies look to use technology to improve their financial services or to make dealing with money easier for their clients.
Robinhood is one of the best-known examples of a fintech business. It is a highly tech-focused company that helps individuals invest in stocks, bonds, ETFs, options, and other securities. The platform has pioneered investing with things like commission-free trading.
Cryptocurrencies have exploded onto the financial scene thanks to numerous fintech companies creating their own coinage. Buy-now, pay-later (BNPL) services are another recent trend in fintech.
Many fintechs work with larger banks to help them provide the financial side of their service, letting fintechs focus on the technology component and develop new products or services to offer their customers.
Fintech credit cards are just one product that fintech businesses can offer. These credit cards often go beyond what typical cards offer, providing things like budgeting and financial automation tools or integrations with various finance apps.
Best Fintech Credit Card Issuers
Fintech is a hot field, and many businesses are in the market. If you’re looking for a fintech credit card, these are some of the top issuers.
Dash.fi
Dash.fi is a fintech business that describes itself as a financial platform built for growth. One of its most important offerings is a charge card designed to help businesses with their digital advertising spending.
Online fraud and data breaches are growing more common by the day. Dash.fi can help by letting customers create unlimited virtual cards. These cards protect your actual card details, saving you the effort of canceling and replacing your card if the details get stolen.
You also have access to dash.fi’s budgeting and spending control tools with its virtual cards. You can assign spending limits or restrictions to individual cards, giving you control over specific employee or department spending. Transactions are automatically added to a financial dashboard, and you can track spending on a card-by-card basis.
As a bonus, the card offers up to 3% cash back on advertising spending during the first two months after opening an account and has no credit check or founder guarantee requirements. This means any startup can apply, even if it doesn’t have a strong credit score.
Divvy
Divvy is another fintech company focused on businesses. It describes itself as an all-in-one expense management solution.
The Divvy card has credit limits of up to $15 million for larger businesses and has no annual fee. Like dash.fi, it lets you create unlimited virtual cards and control spending limits. When you choose to use Divvy’s expense management tool, it also integrates with your financial dashboard.
Upgrade
If you’re looking for a personal card rather than one for a business, Upgrade is a lending-focused fintech with multiple options to choose from.
These include:
Triple Cash Rewards: Pays 3% cash back on home, auto, and health.
Life Rewards: Pays 3% cash back on gas, grocery, health, streaming, and utilities.
Cash Rewards: Pays 1.5% cash back on every purchase.
OneCard: Works like a debit card and a credit card, and you can pay now with no interest or pay later. It also offers rewards of 3% cash back on everyday purchases and 2% on everything else.
Bitcoin Rewards: Offers 1.5% cash in the form of bitcoin.
Upgrade Card: A card designed for building credit.
Each card is unique because it functions like a combination of a credit card and a personal loan. When you make a purchase, it adds to your balance, and you can pay anywhere between the minimum payment and the total balance when you get your monthly statement.
Unlike other credit cards, Upgrade’s cards have a fixed-rate and terms, so you don’t have to worry about a variable rate on the card causing your interest and payments to change.
Aspiration
Aspiration is a fintech company focused on the environment. It offers both a bank account and credit card for individuals.
One unique feature of Aspiration is that when you open an account, you can choose from two fee structures. The first option is to pay what you feel is fair, even if that’s $0. The second is Aspiration Plus, which has a $7.99 monthly or $71.88 annual fee. Aspiration Plus pays higher interest on your checking account balance and offers higher cash back rates on certain purchases.
Aspiration offers the Zero credit card, which has a $60 annual fee and offers 1% cash back on purchases. You can redeem rewards for a statement credit or put the money toward planting trees to help the planet. Aspiration also commits to planting a tree for every purchase made with the card.
Self
Self is a credit-focused fintech that aims to help people build their credit scores. One product it offers is the Self Card.
You need to get a Self Credit Builder Account to get started. This credit builder loan lets you build your credit score by making regular payments into a savings account. Once you’ve built up $100 in savings, you can apply for the Self Card, a secured card that uses your savings balance as collateral.
The card doesn’t offer fancy perks or rewards but can be a powerful tool for building your credit history if you use it properly.
SoFi
SoFi is another lending-focused fintech company that has a credit card offering.
The SoFi card is designed to work in concert with a SoFi checking account. With the card and checking account, you can get a $250 welcome bonus and 3% cash back on every purchase you make in the first year, with 2% cash back after that.
The card has no annual fee and comes with useful perks, including no foreign transaction fees and $1,000 in cell phone insurance coverage when you pay your bill using the card.
When you apply, you can get immediate access to a digital card that you can use online or in a virtual wallet, letting you earn rewards immediately.
Venmo
Venmo is a popular peer-to-peer money transfer app. It also offers a debit card and a credit card.
The credit card adapts its rewards to your spending patterns, offering 3% back on whatever you spend the most on, 2% on your second highest-spend category, and 1% on everything else. If you want to redeem your rewards for crypto, you can do that through the Venmo app.
As a fintech, Venmo offers some nice tech features for its card. You can view your spending habits and build a budget through the app, easily split the cost of purchases made with the card by requesting Venmo payments from friends, and use the app to disable your card if you lose it.
Final Word
Fintechs are companies on the cutting edge of finance, offering unique services and tools to individuals and businesses alike. If you’re looking for an innovative financial product that provides services tailored to your specific needs, there’s a good chance that you’ll find a fintech that is the perfect fit for you.
