What methods are available to issue consumer debit cards? – Hydrogen

This article is for consumer reloadable cards ONLY. Please view our business funded guide here.

API

It is NOT compliant to issue consumer reloadable cards via API as the cardholders will be required to agree to legal terms, and go through bank approved workflows.

White Label Web App

The easiest way to issue cards is through our hosted white label web app! There is no dev work required to issue cards. All user credentialing will be managed through Hydrogen with no-code. Our white label web app automatically creates and stores all usernames and passwords needed for cardholder onboarding and authentication

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Web Components & WebViews

The most flexible option for developers. Please only use this solution if the following items are met:

You are a developer with a technical background to integrate this solution.
You have an existing mobile and/or web app that you wish to integrate the debit card issuance into.

Please note: if you do not have developer resources, we recommend using our standalone white label card apps. This white label app requires zero development, you simply configure the app and change the CNAME registry.

Consumer funded cards will require a username created in Nucleus so that the cardholder can properly authenticate in OAuth to view their data and fund their card after issuance. There are multiple ways to accomplish this:

Sign Up Users Before Issuance

Use this option if one of the two criteria applies;

The user already exists in your system; or
The user is signing up for your site during a previous step and you have captured all of their data.

Please follow the following steps to sign up the users:

Sign up user in the Hydrogen API
- Nucleus Client - POST /nucleus/v1/client with a username. The component will pre-populate as much info as you pass into the client object, besides PII data such as their Social Security Number and Date of Birth.
  - View the password storage options in our article here.
Pass in existing Hydrogen user to component
- If authenticating using the Client Credentials OAuth grant, the Card Issuance component will create a new Nucleus client username by default, containing the user’s email address, unless you pass in a client-id data attribute into the component using the Client. If using the Password OAuth grant the username will be taken from the Nucleus client that is authenticated.

Sign Up Users After Issuance

If you do not sign up the user before issuance, you can still perform the mapping after the process occurs. The user’s email address will create a new Nucleus client_id , which you can retrieve asynchronously using the following two methods:

onSuccess: The “On Success URL” config on the Card Issuance component, will pass the Nucleus client_id of the user. You can then add code to your site to map the logged in user to Hydrogen, by creating a username.
Webhooks: subscribing to either the Client or Card Creation webhooks will give you the Nucleus client_id, which you can then map to your current user base, or create a new user in your system.