Marqeta Lands $1.23 Billion In NASDAQ Debut

Marqeta, which helps companies issue debit cards, notched $1.23 billion through an initial public offering (IPO) on Wednesday (June 9). Shares in the firm soared by up to 21 percent following its introduction on the public market, Bloomberg reported.

Shares of Marqeta were trading at $30.52 at market close on Wednesday (June 9). After estimating its IPO price in the range of $20 to $24, the company ended up selling 45.5 million shares at $27 per share.

Marqeta is trading under the “MQ” ticker symbol on the Nasdaq Global Select Market.

Jason Gardner, the CEO and founder of Marqeta, told Bloomberg that the firm will grow into new markets and nations in which it spots opportunities, while it will also mull over companies to buy.

The debut of Marqeta on the public market comes on the heels of many listings from FinTech firms during the last year.

“The reason there’s a flurry of companies especially in the payment space is that everything is moving to modern platforms,” Gardner told the news outlet. “Payments are becoming more digitized.”

As PYMNTS previously reported, quickly expanding, digital-first/digital-only firms, particularly in the payments sector, sometimes rely on a couple of important levers to fuel that expansion. To that end, revenue streams may depend on a couple of important products or services, or a couple of outsized clients, or dependence on trends inside a certain geography.

Marqeta’s own filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) expound upon the dual-edged nature of its growth engines — in which risk and reward are intertwined, pinned to interchange fees and a very sizable key client.

“We expect interchange fees to continue to represent a significant percentage of our total net revenue in the near term. The amount of interchange fees we earn is highly dependent on the interchange rates that the card networks set and adjust,” Marqeta wrote in a filing.

It also noted in a filing that Square comprised 70 percent of Marqeta’s net revenues last year.