Approved Credit Should Be Usable Credit: How Fundbox, Lithic, and Mastercard Are Accelerating Capital Access for Small Businesses

How It Works

Fundbox, Lithic, and Mastercard have built an infrastructure layer that delivers approved credit as a ready-to-use usable virtual card credential. When a small business is approved for a Fundbox credit line, they receive a multi-use virtual Mastercard, issued by Lead Bank via Lithic’s platform, ready to transact at the point of purchase. No transfer initiated. No clearing window. Capital available in seconds. Additionally, for companies that prioritize tangible payment methods, a physical card option is provided.

This is enabled by Mastercard’s Loan on Card program, whose network allows approved credit to move directly into card credentials at the moment of approval, bypassing traditional transfer rails entirely. Lithic serves as the issuer processing design partner, providing the platform through which cards are issued by Lead Bank in real time.

Three Companies. Three Layers. One Seamless Experience.

This isn’t a typical partnership. It’s a deliberate assembly of three complementary layers of financial infrastructure, each a leader in its domain, designed to work as a unified system.

Mastercard brings the global payment network and the vision behind this initiative. Through its Loan on Card program, Mastercard has created a new mechanism that enables lenders to disburse approved credit directly via virtual card credentials, bypassing ACH entirely. It’s a network-level innovation designed to modernize how capital moves, and Mastercard selected Lithic as its issuer processing design partner to bring it to life.

Lithic is the card issuer processing platform powering next-generation financial experiences. Its programmable APIs and credit ledger technology give lenders the flexibility to build exactly the kind of lending experience this use case demands, one where the card credential is issued the moment credit is approved, ready to use at the point of purchase. Lithic was built for this.

Fundbox is the embedded capital infrastructure behind the digital SMB economy, providing fast, direct access to credit through the tools businesses already use. Fundbox contributes the underwriting intelligence and embedded capital platform that makes the credit decision fast and accurate, and the partner relationships that bring this capability directly into the platforms small businesses rely on.

Together, these three organizations have built a fully connected experience where a small business applies for credit, gets approved, and receive virtual Mastercard credential ready to transact at the point of purchase.

What This Means

For small businesses: Capital approval and capital access become the same moment. A business that qualifies for a credit line can spend against it immediately, at a supplier, a vendor, a point-of-sale, without waiting for funds to clear. The financial agility that enterprise companies take for granted becomes accessible to the businesses that historically haven’t had it.

For platforms: Embedded credit has always had a handoff problem. Approval happens inside your platform; capital arrives somewhere else, later. Virtual card disbursement closes that gap. A user approved inside your product can transact inside your product, immediately. Platforms no longer need to piece together an issuer, card program manager, and capital infrastructure separately. Fundbox’s platform brings them together, right out of the box.

For the industry: 30 million small businesses represent nearly half of U.S. private sector employment. Shortening the distance between credit approval and usable capital, even by a day or two, compounds across millions of transactions. More businesses can act on time-sensitive opportunities, manage cash flow more precisely, and grow without waiting on the financial system to catch up.

A New Standard for Infrastructure Partnerships

Fundbox reached live transactions on the Mastercard network 53 days after contract signing. For an implementation of this scope, spanning card issuing, network connectivity, and embedded capital infrastructure, industry peers typically measure comparable efforts in quarters.

It matters because implementation speed reflects infrastructure quality. Systems that take months to connect are systems that take months to fix, extend, and iterate. The pace of this launch is evidence of what the underlying architecture can support.

Bo Jiang framed it directly: “Fifty-three days from contract to live cards in the market is not a one-time sprint, it’s how we build.”

For platforms evaluating capital infrastructure partners, that’s a meaningful signal.

Building the Future of Small Business Finance

The best infrastructure partnerships aren’t about integrating systems. They’re about aligning on a shared belief about how the industry should work, and then building toward it together.

Fundbox, Lithic, and Mastercard share that belief: that approved credit should be usable credit. That the gap between approval and access is a problem worth solving. That small businesses deserve the same financial agility that large enterprises have always had.

This partnership is a step toward that future. And it’s one we’re proud to be building together.