The Karta.io Business Corporate Visa is a credit card that more than 70 private wealth banks hand to their own clients, some of whom need $10 million on deposit to open an account at all. Most of those clients never hear that stablecoins sit behind their spending, and that is the detail I keep coming back to. In a Stabledash interview published on April 22, 2026, Karta founder and CEO Freddy Juez said the card was open to Latin American customers, with Europe and Asia next.
What the Karta.io Business Corporate Visa actually is
Karta is a credit card. You spend first and repay later, so the money does not leave a wallet you control at the moment of purchase. That one choice shapes the rest of the programme: who it chases, how it is sold, and where the risk sits.
The distribution model is B2B2C. Karta signs private banks and wealth managers, and those firms put the card in front of their own international clients. By the time of the interview the network had passed 70 partner banks, after 40 were added in the previous year, and Juez wanted 100 to 150 by the third or fourth quarter. The company itself is small: 18 people, most of them in Miami or elsewhere in Latin America, with an office and a team in Brazil.
The customers are high-net-worth individuals with a private banking relationship. Juez gives one yardstick: at one partner bank, which he calls one of the top five in the world, opening an account takes at least $10 million. He adds that the bigger the brokerage account, the bigger the spend, which is why Karta serves this client base rather than mass-market travellers.
Corporate cards were a plan, not a shipped product. Juez describes the current card as being for high-net-worth individuals "for now" and says Karta hopes to launch corporate cards at some point. A business cannot apply for one today.
He also makes a point of what Karta does not sell. Clients are not pitched stablecoins or crypto, and Juez says the company does not have to tell them the card runs on stablecoins at all. The stablecoin layer sits in Karta's plumbing, well away from the customer's portfolio.
Who issues the card and how the money reaches it
Rain is the card issuer, and it is also where funding meets spending. Juez describes the structure like this. A traditional lender provides a warehouse facility, the credit line that funds a card programme's spend while cardholders are between purchases and repayment. The money sits in an SPV, a separate legal entity set up for the financing, and from there it powers a smart contract that Karta owns through Rain. That contract gives the cards their spending power. Every swipe creates a receivable, and those receivables are pledged to the lender.
He is explicit that this took work. A crypto lender able to offer 90%-plus advance rates at Karta's scale was hard to find, so he went to a traditional lender and spent time getting it comfortable with the flow of funds and with Karta's compliance. What helped was the book: Juez says the portfolio had no losses and no delinquencies and that the clients are wealthy private banking customers. Those are his words about his own business, not figures anyone outside the company has checked.
The facility is $125 million. Juez says Karta was offered more and chose that size, and he compares it with the $150 million Ramp raised from Goldman Sachs in its early days. He also says the money lets the programme power "thousands of users", and that he hopes tier-one banks and crypto lenders will join later at better pricing.
Custody works differently from a self-custody debit card. There is no personal wallet being drained at checkout here. Karta collects fiat and stablecoins and settles with the card side, and the client repays afterwards, from a US bank account or in Brazil through a local payment. Whatever stablecoin exposure exists sits on Karta's side of the ledger, in its funding and settlement, not in a wallet the cardholder holds. Plenty of cards marketed as crypto cards are debit products that pull from a balance you control and fail at the till when the balance is short. This one extends credit instead.
Why credit, and what the funding costs
Juez's case for credit over debit comes down to the buffer it gives a traveller. Debit takes the money from your balance the moment you pay, and hotels and car rental desks often hold a deposit above the final bill, so a debit card can tie up cash you wanted for the trip. A credit line lets the charge sit until the statement. He puts it plainly, asking when anyone last travelled with a debit card.
Credit also means Karta carries the cost of the money in between. That cost has a name, cost of funds, and it is what a lender charges Karta for the cash behind the card. Pricing runs off SOFR, the dollar benchmark many loans are set against, plus a spread, and Juez says the spread steps down as the facility is drawn, so the first slice costs more than the later ones. He names cost of funds as the area where Karta still has room to improve, and he has a point: cheaper money is what decides whether a card programme can compete on terms with the incumbents.
Karta's fee schedule and spending limits were not part of the interview, so check the issuer's terms before you weigh the card against the one in your wallet.
Brazil first, then the rest of Latin America
The product exists because of a specific cost. Juez says Brazilians lose roughly 6% to 10% every time they swipe a card abroad. Part of that is the conversion spread and the fees stacked on top of the network rate, which is why a card that lets you spend in dollars and repay from dollars can look cheaper than a local card. The gap between the two is the entire commercial argument.
Karta's answer is repayment flexibility. A client can pay the credit card bill in the US from a US bank account, or pay locally in Brazil. The spend happens in the currency of the trip; the repayment happens in the currency the client already holds. The card does not remove the conversion. It moves the conversion to a place where the client can control it.
Brazil came before its neighbours for a regulatory reason. Juez says Brazil had the most sophisticated legal infrastructure for cards funded with stablecoins, and while Argentina may have a bigger pain point for travellers, Brazilian rules were cleaner to run compliance against from the US. Argentina, Mexico and Colombia were the other markets on the list. Argentina and Colombia were the largest Latin American customer bases, and Brazil was also large, so the three sit close together.
Karta is based in Miami, and most of its partner banks are in Miami too, serving Latin American families with money outside their home country. Juez says the same banks can carry the card into Europe and Asia, which makes the expansion a distribution exercise rather than a new product build. At the time of the interview the card was restricted to Latin American customers, and he said European and Asian customers were about to be added through partner banks that were still to be announced.
The WhatsApp concierge and its one-time cards
Everything the cardholder does runs through WhatsApp. Activation, notifications, reversals, disputes and chargebacks all happen in the chat, and a concierge sits on top: book flights, book hotels, book a car rental, chase a company that charged twice. Juez describes it as a multi-agent operation that acts on the user's behalf, and he frames WhatsApp for Latin America the way WeChat works in Asia, as the place where a whole financial life can sit.
The part that got my attention is the one-time card. A customer asked Karta to pay a BVI company renewal and sent the link. The agent went to the website, generated a card number for that single payment, used it, and the payment was done. A one-time virtual card exists for one transaction and then stops working, which keeps the merchant from charging it again and limits what a leaked number can do. Putting that flow behind a chat message is clever product design, because it turns a card feature into a sentence you type.
The spending power behind the card is built for large single purchases. Juez gives the example of a $150,000 watch in one transaction, which tells you the credit line is set for a different customer than the usual prepaid-card user.
Adoption of the concierge is quiet by design. Karta does not advertise it, and Juez says the company does not even notify users that it exists. There is a Slack channel where the team watches what people ask the agent, and he describes the range of requests as limitless, from school fees to company renewals to sending flowers. His read is that agentic commerce is underhyped rather than overhyped. The evidence he offers is thinner than the claim: a channel full of requests shows appetite, not that the agent gets every task right.
His retention argument is about service rather than price. He says, "even if Amex is offered for free, our users want to stay with Karta because of the level of service that we give." That is a claim about his own customers, and a churn number would settle it.
The numbers behind the programme
| Item | Figure | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Warehouse facility | $125 million | The credit line that funds cardholder spend |
| Partner banks | More than 70, after 40 added in the previous year | Distribution is the business |
| Target bank network | 100 to 150 by the third or fourth quarter | The plan was to roughly double |
| Minimum account at one top-five partner bank | $10 million | The client profile |
| Typical FX loss for Brazilian cardholders abroad | 6% to 10% | The problem the card is sold against |
| What Amex and Chase reportedly pay to acquire a client | $2,000 to $3,000 | Why bank distribution is cheaper |
| Team size | 18 people | Small team, large counterparties |
Juez dates the company at about two years old, with the idea itself born 15 months before the interview. Seventy banks and 18 staff is a company that sells through other people's relationships. A $125 million facility sized to power thousands of users sets the scale. The $10 million minimum says who the customer is. The 6% to 10% is the pitch, and the $2,000 to $3,000 that Amex and Chase reportedly pay to acquire a client explains why Juez treats the bank network as his main defence.
The risks I would weigh
Credit risk comes first. This is a lending product, and the money comes back only if clients repay. Juez says the book has no losses and no delinquencies, which is his description of his own portfolio. A private banking client with a large brokerage account is a good risk until markets move against them or an account gets frozen. I would want to see the book through a bad quarter before treating that record as a feature of the design.
Funding concentration is the second. The spending power comes from one warehouse facility from one traditional lender. If that facility is not renewed, or the lender tightens its terms, the card's limits are the first thing to feel it. Juez says he expects more lenders to come in; until they do, a single relationship sits under the whole programme.
Underwriting skips the usual inputs. Karta does not check income or a credit score, according to Juez. The relationship with the partner bank, and the balance behind it, does the work instead. That is efficient, and it moves the risk: the card is only as strong as the bank's own view of the client, and the bank can change that view.
Regulation and the invisible stablecoin. The programme was built around Brazil's rules because they were the clearest, and rules change. A partner bank or a regulator that dislikes a stablecoin-funded card could slow distribution in a market, and Karta would have to explain a structure it has deliberately kept in the background.
Tax is the one cardholders forget. In many countries, spending crypto counts as a disposal for tax purposes, so every purchase can create a gain or loss you have to report. This card is repaid from a bank account, but any card you fund directly with stablecoins or crypto creates that event each time you pay, and the record keeping is yours.
The agent is a new place for mistakes. An assistant that can create a card number and pay an invoice is convenient, and it is also a machine acting on your money. The damage from a wrong payment depends on the cap on each generated card and on how the agent confirms what it is paying, which are the two things I would test before letting it near a large bill.
Concentration of the business. The customer base is Latin American, the partner banks are largely in Miami, and the network grew from scratch to more than 70 banks in about a year. Growth at that pace strains compliance and support, which is where card programmes usually break first.
What to check before you sign up
- Confirm which partner bank distributes the card in your country and whether your account there qualifies. Karta does not sell directly, so the bank is your counterparty.
- Ask for the cardholder agreement and read the fee section line by line: issuance, monthly or annual charges, the conversion markup, ATM fees and late payment. Those numbers decide whether the 6% to 10% saving is real for you.
- Check the currency the statement is in and how a purchase abroad is converted. That is where the saving either shows up or disappears.
- Ask how the credit line is set from your relationship, and what happens to it if your balance falls or your account is restricted.
- Confirm which countries and currencies can be used to pay the bill. The US bank account route and the Brazilian local route are the two described.
- Test the concierge on something small with a capped card before you hand it a large invoice, and watch what it confirms back to you.
- Keep records if any part of your flow touches crypto, because a taxable disposal is easy to forget a year later.
- Check the network logo on the physical card and whether it is accepted where you travel. Some networks are stronger in some regions than others.
- Verify the web address before you enter card or identity details anywhere, the same habit that protects you with any financial product.
If the agreement you are handed shows a clean conversion rate and a short fee list, the card does what it says for a traveller who already banks privately and already earns in dollars. If the agreement is vague, the 6% to 10% headline is advertising, and the bank branch that handed you the card is the place to ask why.
