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This guide covers three decisions that shape how money reaches your cards: which account type backs each card type, whether cards draw on their funding account directly or through a hierarchy, and how many cards an account can hold.

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Account types

Synctera uses different account types for different card types. In practice you build a separate account template for each card type you offer, and create accounts from that template.
A card account must have cards enabled. Set is_card_enabled to true on the account template, or on the account itself. Accounts that only fund other accounts — pool accounts and funding parents — normally have cards disabled and P2P enabled instead.

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Funding relationships

How a card is funded depends on whether it spends directly from the account that holds the money, or from an account that is topped up from elsewhere.

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Direct funding

The card is linked directly to the funding account. The balance the cardholder can spend is the balance on that account. Common use cases:
  • Consumer debit programs
  • Consumer prepaid programs
  • Consumer credit programs — these technically fall under direct funding, although the available balance or credit is backed by a linked deposit account or line of credit

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Just-in-time funding

The card is linked to an account that is itself funded by another account, either in real time or through just-in-time (JIT) funding. There can be multiple levels of funding accounts above the card’s account. Common use cases:
  • Commercial and small business debit and prepaid programs
  • Commercial credit programs
JIT funding is built with balance floors and ceilings on the card’s account, which trigger a transfer from the parent account when the balance falls below the floor. See Balance Floor and Ceiling and Linked Accounts for the mechanics, and Business Expense Cards for a worked example that combines a pool account, per-employee accounts, and spend controls.

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Number of cards per account

The maximum number of cards a person can hold on a card product is configured on the card product itself, through card_limit. This limit is not applied to business cards.
  • Consumer programs are limited to one active (non-terminated) physical card and a small number of active virtual cards per account. The exact virtual card limit is set on your card product — check card_limit on the product via List Card Products.
  • Commercial and business programs have no limit on the number of active physical and virtual cards per active account.
Terminated cards do not count toward the limit. If a customer has reached their limit, terminate an unused card before issuing a new one, or reissue the existing card rather than issuing an additional one.

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Assigning a card to a customer later

A card can be issued against a business without naming a cardholder. Pass business_id without customer_id at issuance, and the card is created but cannot be activated or used for spend until a person is assigned to it with Update Card. This is how bulk programs work: cards are manufactured and shipped to the business in bulk, then assigned to individual employees on site. See Bulk Card Orders.