Courtesy of a partnership with a pair of current customers, card issuing platform Marqeta is open for business in Australia. The company announced today that its arrival in the Asia-Pacific market will also help support fellow Finovate alum Klarna and customer Doordash as they expand in the country.

“Card issuing is on its way to being an $80 trillion global opportunity by 2030, and Marqeta is perfectly positioned to take advantage of this over the coming years,” Marqeta founder and CEO Jason Gardner said. “The Australian market relies heavily on card spending and is digitizing rapidly. It is a market that was important to our customers and where we saw a lot of potential for Marqeta technology to help revolutionize customer experience in payments.”

Marqeta’s announcement comes in the wake of news that the company – in partnership with Visa – had earned certification to process payments in 10 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. In Australia, the first market in the APAC where Marqeta’s services will be available, the company hopes to take advantage of both the high penetration of traditional bank accounts compared to the rest of the region, as well as a boom in digital payments.

With the first transactions facilitated by Marqeta in late January, partner Klarna is already appreciating the results. “Our close collaboration in bringing an entirely new product offering and shopping experience to the Australian market in record time has been a big success,” Koen Koppen, Klarna CTO, said. “The positive reaction of Australian consumers is evident in just how many are downloading and using the app and virtual card each day.”

An alum of our developers conference, Marqeta delivered a presentation on Democratizing Issuer Payment Processing with Just-in-Time Funding at FinDEVr Silicon Valley in 2016. The Oakland, California-based company was last valued at nearly $2 billion, following a May 2019 Series E round that added $260 million to Marqeta’s coffers.