Unit Debuts Turnkey Solution for Businesses to Issue Virtual Cards, Live Bank Accounts

Unit, a Banking-as-a-Service platform empowering companies to embed financial services into products, announced Thursday (Jan. 20) that it has debuted a new way to issue virtual cards.

It will be a new pilot environment, letting companies making live bank accounts and issue virtual cards in minutes.

“In the last year, Unit has enabled more than 100 companies to launch production-ready banking products in weeks when it previously took over a year,” CEO Itai Damti said in the press release. “We’ve had customers go from no code to fully live in 21 days. We wanted to make it even faster and easier for companies to build and launch new banking products.

“With our new pilot environment, companies can now test their product using real funds and build a proof-of-concept to get investor or executive investment in minutes.”

The pilot represents a new solution letting companies build accounts, cards and payments, and the release notes that early adopters were able to do all of that “instantly.”

Per the release, Unit aims to boost financial access through building tools to empower more FinTech builders, and the company “abstracts away” the challenges of building and bringing banking experiences to market.

Unit launched in late 2020 and now has over 100 customers and $70 million in funding.

PYMNTS wrote that banking as a service, and embedded banking, while usually concentrated in the FinTech and financial services areas, have now become more ubiquitous.

See also: Banking as a Service Gets Boost From EU Creator Economy

More companies not in the financial services realms have begun implementing them — including Apple and Goldman Sachs, which have rolled out buy now, pay later (BNPL) services for Apple Pay, called Apple Pay Later.

In addition, Talenthouse, an art networking site, has debuted a banking solution for the needs of those in its creative community — an underserved demographic in financial services. The company also recently partnered with software company Vodeno to bring banking services.