Virtual cards

A virtual card is a temporary prepaid card for making online payments. They're like physical bank cards, but you can get them in seconds and use them to pay anywhere on the Internet. Virtual cards can be either dollar cards or naira cards. You can see and manage all virtual cards in your account on the Cards page of your dashboard.

Virtual cards and virtual accounts are unrelated

Virtual accounts allow you to receive payments into your Flutterwave wallet via bank transfer, while virtual cards allow you to make online payments.

Why use a virtual card?

Virtual cards are for easy online payments. Like physical cards, they're issued by a card issuer (such as VISA or MasterCard), but they open up more opportunities—you can get a dollar card with a US billing address in seconds without leaving your home.

Naira virtual card limitations

While dollar cards can be used globally, naira virtual cards can only be used on platforms that use Flutterwave as a payment processor.

Virtual cards are also useful for isolating expenses. You can create a card for employee expenses, one for cloud payments, one for shopping on Amazon and so on. With our API, you can fund, cancel, or view transactions for each card separately.

Even better, they can power your business. If you're building an app with a wallet system, you can issue cards to your users so they can make external payments with their funds in your app. Flutterwave makes this easy: sign up as a merchant and you can create virtual cards for your account, which you then pass on to your users.

Creating a virtual card

Approval required

To create virtual cards in Live Mode, your Flutterwave account needs to be approved. Please reach out to our support to get started with card issuing.

New or restricted accounts would encounter problems creating cards and experience an error that says, You cannot create cards at this time.

You can create a virtual card with the create card endpoint, which is supported in some of our backend SDKs. At the very least, you'll need to specify the card currency, the name on the card (which would be your user's name), and the amount to fund the card with (from your Flutterwave wallet):

{
    "currency": "USD",
    "amount":5,
    "debit_currency": "NGN",
    "billing_name": "Example User.",
    "billing_address": "333, Fremont Street",
    "billing_city": "San Francisco",
    "billing_state": "CA",
    "billing_postal_code": "94105",
    "billing_country": "US",
    "first_name": "Example",
    "last_name": "User",
    "date_of_birth": "1996/12/30",
    "email": "userg@example.com",
    "phone": "07030000000",
    "title": "MR",
    "gender": "M",
    "callback_url": "https://webhook.site/b67965fa-e57c-4dda-84ce-0f8d6739b8a5"
}

Pricing

Kindly send us an email at hi@flutterwavego.com for details on the charges and funding restrictions for virtual cards.

If all goes well, you'll have a new virtual card, and you can pass on the card details (card number and billing address details) to your user.

{
  "status": "success",
  "message": "Card created successfully",
  "data": {
    "id": "43ec6e92-9eb7-48ad-91c8-7bee425a33cf",
    "account_id": 65637,
    "amount": "1725",
    "currency": "USD",
    "card_hash": "43ec6e92-9eb7-48ad-91c8-7bee425a33cf",
    "card_pan": "1234456789101112",
    "masked_pan": "123445*******1112",
    "city": "San Francisco",
    "state": "CA",
    "address_1": "3563 Huntertown Rd, Allison park, PA",
    "address_2": null,
    "zip_code": "94105",
    "cvv": "134",
    "expiration": "2023-01",
    "send_to": null,
    "bin_check_name": null,
    "card_type": "visa",
    "name_on_card": "Omotayo Chigozie",
    "created_at": "2020-01-17T18:33:29.0130255+00:00",
    "is_active": true,
    "callback_url": null
  }
}

{
  "status": "error",
  "message": "One or more field failed validation.",
  "data": null
}

You can even create a cool card UI in your app, to display the details to your user😀:

Managing virtual cards

Now that you've created a card, your user can use it to pay online, and you can manage it from your dashboard or with our API:

Card events

When creating a card, you can specify a callback_url, where you'll be notified of any events that happen on the card, such as funding, purchases, card freezes, and termination.

Here's an example of the payload sent to a callback URL for a card termination:

{
  "transactionId": 777,
  "merchantName": "APPLE/ITUNES",
  "description": "Termination",
  "status": "Successful",
  "balance": 10.0,
  "amount": 10.0,
  "type": "Termination",
  "cardId": "1a4664-***-3838382-***-sd399",
  "maskedPan": "405640******1123"
}

Got questions?