Nexi and Visa have announced a strategic partnership to scale managed card issuing solutions for banks in Germany.
The initiative will focus on enabling banks to offer a complete range of Visa products without building or maintaining the underlying operational infrastructure themselves.
Under the partnership, Nexi will provide end-to-end managed issuing products, which will be covering implementation, operations, compliance, and ongoing product development, while Visa contributes its network, tokenisation capabilities, and security infrastructure. The arrangement is structured as a fully managed service model, meaning German banks will have the possibility to delegate the operational complexity of card issuing to Nexi rather than running it in-house.
The model is not new to Nexi. The Italy-based PayTech company has already deployed a comparable approach in Italy, where it serves more than 100 banks and multiple of cardholders. The German rollout represents an extension of that model to one of Europe's largest banking markets.
Managed issuing model targets German bank modernisation
According to the official press release, the product portfolio available through the partnership was designed to support distinct cardholder segments. These include premium card programmes for affluent and high-net-worth customers, business and SME cards with integrated expense control tools, and digital-first propositions aimed at younger customers with streamlined onboarding. Each programme is delivered as a managed service, enabling banks to bring new card propositions to market with reduced time-to-market and without allocating significant internal resource to product build or compliance management.
The broader context for this agreement is a structural shift in how banks approach payments infrastructure. Regulatory obligations, fraud prevention requirements, digital wallet integration, and tokenisation have each increased the technical complexity of running a card issuing programme. For many banks, particularly those without dedicated payments technology divisions, the operational burden of keeping pace with these requirements has made third-party managed services a strategically attractive option.
In addition, Visa's participation in the arrangement reflects a broader industry pattern in which card networks support managed issuing partnerships to accelerate product deployment and maintain relevance at the point of card issuance. For Nexi, the agreement reinforces its positioning as a third-party issuing specialist across European markets, building on existing infrastructure and client relationships developed in Italy.
The two companies have indicated they will work together to bring the combined model to the German banking market, though no specific launch timeline or names of banking clients have been disclosed.
