Debit on one side, Credit on the other: Marqeta rethinks the Card

An interview with Todd Pollak by Sean Murphy

Hold a payment card up to the light and it looks like a settled object, a fixed thing with a number, an expiry date and a single account behind it. Todd Pollak would like you to imagine it differently. In the version of the card he describes, one side is a debit account and the other is a loan and which one you use is a decision you make in an app on your phone, in the seconds before you tap. Tap once and the money leaves your current account as cash. Open the app, choose to spread the cost over four payments or twelve months, and the next tap turns the same piece of plastic into an installment loan. The card is the same but it can do a lot more than you think.

Pollak is Chief Revenue Officer at Marqeta, the issuer processor founded in 2010 that has spent the years since positioning itself against systems built for a different age. The competition he describes is not other start-ups but the mainframe-era platforms that still carry much of the world's card traffic, many of them designed in the 1960s and 1970s and run on green-screen terminals built for stability rather than speed. Those systems limited what could be done in order to guarantee that what was done would not fall over. Marqeta's pitch, in Pollak's telling, is the inversion of that bargain: cloud infrastructure and open programming interfaces that let a customer make choices to best meet their needs.. He cites a programme that went live across fifteen countries in under thirty days, a timeline that would once have meant standing up a new environment, building a front end and physically installing hardware in data centres for each market in turn.

The clearest illustration of what that flexibility buys sits in the recent history of buy now, pay later, a market Pollak has watched grow up in three distinct phases. In the first, providers had to integrate at each merchant's point of sale, one painstaking implementation at a time, and a retailer that had already wired up one provider rarely had the engineering capacity to add a second. The second phase routed around that bottleneck. Rather than rebuild the checkout, providers such as Klarna began paying merchants with single-use virtual cards, sending the full basket amount straight to the retailer while the shopper settled the balance in instalments behind the scenes. A hundred pounds at Tesco went to Tesco as a hundred pounds, and the four-part repayment was a private arrangement between the consumer and Klarna that the shop never had to see.

The third phase, the one Pollak is most animated about, hands the choice to the shopper directly. The flexible credential, now offered by both Mastercard and Visa, is a single card lashed to multiple funding sources, debit on one side and a credit or instalment facility on the other, usable anywhere the traditional rails reach. The shopper still runs on the same card networks as before. What they skip is the merchant-by-merchant plumbing that used to decide where a given payment method would and would not work. Credit becomes a setting the cardholder carries from shop to shop.

By industry estimates, global BNPL transaction volume reached roughly 560 billion dollars in 2025, making it among the faster-growing forms of consumer credit. Pollak is careful to add a caveat that many of its champions skip, which is that the financial responsibility built into installment products differs sharply from the way revolving credit works, and that the people using it may not think of it as credit at all. The growth is real but the language has not quite caught up with it.

Underneath the product story there is a shift in who consumers and companies actually trust. Pollak's reading is that fintechs have moved from challenger to default in significant pockets of the market, and that the dividing line is partly generational. The younger the customer, on his account, the more likely they are to regard a fintech as more reputable than an established bank. On the business side he puts the figure at more than half of small and medium-sized companies now being comfortable with using a fintech somewhere in their day-to-day financial operations, whether for lending, identity or money movement, rather than routing everything through traditional providers.

His analogy for how this happened reaches back to the arrival of the iPhone. Employees wanted the device they used at home on their desks at work, and enterprises that had not planned for personal hardware carrying sensitive corporate data scrambled to build controls around it. Consumer expectation set the pace and the institutions adapted in arrears. Fintech, in his framing, did the same thing to banking. Firms such as Revolut became successful enough at pulling people away from traditional banking that legacy institutions found themselves having to behave more like the upstarts, matching features they had once been able to ignore. The pressure flowed from the customer upward, not from the incumbent down.

What that looks like in practice is a value proposition older institutions struggle to match without rethinking their economics. Pollak points to a European customer offering one to one and a half per cent cash back on a debit account tied to a trading product, the kind of giveaway a traditional bank would historically have reserved for customers holding substantial balances. It is, he says, among the fastest-growing card programmes Marqeta runs. The same logic is gathering around stablecoins, where the prospect of outsized benefits on assets held in digital form has drawn interest from the institutions that once kept their distance.

Pollak is content to let the dust settle on that last question rather than predict where it lands. It is a fitting place for someone in his position to leave things, because everything he describes is not a single product winning but the steady transfer of choice toward the person holding the card. The instrument that once dictated terms, one account, one method, one set of rules fixed at the point of issue, has become something closer to a surface the consumer configures to suit the moment. The card in your wallet looks the same as it did ten years ago but now the cardholder has more choice.