Meal vouchers in Europe / Verestro card infrastructure, and when not to use it

Verestro card infrastructure, and when not to use it

Verestro is a Global Mobile Payments Technology Provider. On a benefit programme that means the card infrastructure underneath yours: issuing, the rules that decide what a card may buy, processing and the transaction record. This page is the fit test, including the half of it that says no.

When we are the right supplier

• The acceptance decision has to be yours. Where the law wants a contract with every accepting merchant, a category code cannot express it, and most platforms stop there. Ours hands the decision to you on every authorisation.
• You want the brand to stay yours. We are infrastructure. Nobody your employees see has to be us, and the customer relationship does not pass through us.
• You are moving off a supplier that failed you. This category has had providers wind down, get sold and get sanctioned, and the companies sitting on them had no say in it. Migration is a route we have thought about properly.
• You need several countries on one platform. Seventeen sets of rules, one integration, and adding the next market is rules rather than a rebuild.

When we are not

• You need a licence of your own. We do not hold an electronic money or payment institution licence. Issuing is delivered with licensed partners, which suits most programmes and not all.
• You need acquiring. We do not do it. If your programme depends on taking payments from merchants rather than issuing to employees, this is the wrong door.
• You need a network we are not on. We issue on Mastercard.
• You want a turnkey benefit programme with a sales force attached. We build the card, not the commercial operation around it. If you want somebody to sell the benefit to employers for you, that is a different kind of partner.

Four of each, and the second list is the useful one. A supplier that cannot tell you what it is bad at has not thought about where it is good.

How to check us without asking us

Read the documentation. Our API documentation is public, including the authentication, the error cases and the platform cost model. Vendors who are confident publish this. Vendors who are not put it behind a call.

Read the rules pages on this site. Seventeen countries, every figure dated and attributed. They exist because we had to understand this category properly to build for it, and they are the best evidence available that we did.

Ask about the failure case. What happens to the balance, who holds the employee records, what you can export and on what notice. Ask us and ask anyone else you are considering. The answers differ more than the feature lists do.

What we actually deliver on a benefit programme

Card issuing with a licensed partner, virtual and physical. The rules engine that applies acceptance conditions, ceilings and exclusions. Processing, balances and the transaction record. Scheme certification and the technical launch. Hosting, PCI DSS and security compliance sit inside the monthly per card price, so the audited environment is not a separate project on your side.

What stays with you is the brand, the customer, the commercial terms and, if your market needs it, the acceptance rules themselves.

Where to go next

The overview is the short version. Pricing explains the three fees and the side that earns, integration is for whoever has to approve the technical design, and the country rules tell you what applies where you operate.