IDEMIA Secure Transactions Launches End-to-End Payment APIs to Transform Card Issuance

The announcement comes as issuers face increasing pressure to improve both customer experience and operational efficiency in a rapidly evolving payments landscape. For cardholders, payment experiences are expected to be instant, seamless, and connected across both physical and digital channels. Customers increasingly demand faster card delivery, premium personalization, instant activation, real-time card controls, instant digital issuance, push provisioning to mobile wallets, and secure frictionless payments, all directly accessible through their banking applications.

For issuers, meeting these expectations requires modern infrastructure capable of supporting real-time issuance, production, tracking, digitization capabilities, and API-driven issuance operations for stock and forecast management. Banks and fintechs also require standardized APIs to support instant issuance and digital payment use cases while simplifying integration by minimizing connections to third-party platforms and mobile applications.

Since March 2025, IST has rolled out a new suite of APIs that modernizes the way issuers, IST personalization centers, and delivery systems interact. The APIs enable every stage of the card issuance process, from order to delivery, to be tracked in near real-time. According to the company, its card personalization APIs redefine traditional production by transforming a static production step into a dynamic, connected service. This approach creates the digital backbone required for real-time issuance, automated workflows, and a broad ecosystem of real-time digital services throughout the payment credential lifecycle.

“The shift to API-based personalization is about unlocking new value potential for our customers. It unlocks operations from batch constraints, real-time innovation for customer experience teams, and frees up workflows from manual silos. Issuers don’t just become more efficient; they become more agile, more responsive, and better equipped to deliver the personalized experiences customers now expect. That’s the real power of this transformation,” said Elyette Roux, EVP Payment Services, IST.

Building on its personalization capabilities, IST is expanding its offering with a new suite of APIs that extends from physical card personalization to comprehensive digitalization services and beyond. The company said these modular building blocks enable issuers to access, combine, and scale a broad range of payment capabilities while accelerating innovation and reducing both integration and operational complexity.

Designed to integrate seamlessly with issuer back-end systems, including Card Management Systems and Authorization Servers, as well as mobile applications, the APIs are organized into five core service families aligned with the complete card lifecycle.

The Issuance APIs enable issuers to orchestrate and automate the complete card issuance lifecycle, covering the creation, personalization, provisioning, and delivery of both physical and digital payment cards. For physical cards, these APIs support card pulls, inventory management, PIN and CVV generation, and related issuance functions.

The Lifecycle APIs allow issuers to manage the complete physical and digital card lifecycle in real time, including production and shipment status updates, PIN services, renewals, replacements, token management, and wallet management. They also enable the secure processing and orchestration of proximity and remote digital payment transactions and card services in real time, including wallet interactions, workflow authorizations, tokenized payment transactions, and fraud controls.

The Authentication APIs enable strong and secure end-user FIDO-based authentication, particularly for online operations and agent-initiated payments.

Customer Experience APIs and Mobile SDKs provide mobile-first card services designed to enhance cardholder experiences within banking applications. These include card art selection, card delivery tracking, access to digital inserts, card activation, secure display of card details and PIN, virtual card generation, push provisioning to mobile wallets, mobile authentication, and tap-to-pay enablement.

The Payment Cryptography & Key Management APIs allow banks to secure their payment card issuance infrastructure through HSM-as-a-Service by managing cryptographic keys, encryption, and transaction signing. Issuers can also access the IST test environment to explore the quantum-ready cryptographic library and develop future-proof applications.

With more than 700 million physical payment products issued in 2025, IST said it combines extensive expertise in large-scale physical card issuance with advanced digital payment capabilities. As a major independent tokenization provider, the company has provisioned more than 500 million payment tokens across a wide range of digital payment use cases. Built on PCI-certified, resilient, secure, and scalable SaaS platforms, IST’s API-driven services are designed to help issuers accelerate innovation through a flexible business model and modular approach, enabling them to select and use only the services they require.