HPS PowerCARD vs Lithic

HPS PowerCARD-Issuer provides services for issuing and managing credit, debit, prepaid, and other payment cards. HPS says it serves issuers from small organizations to global financial institutions, including banks, credit companies, retailers, and private processors. The platform manages portfolios across countries, currencies, products, institutions, and languages. Rule-based workflows handle card origination through different channels and formats, including the collection and use of payment information. Issuer functions include card and customer management, credit and prepaid accounts, clearing and settlement, fraud, chargebacks, reporting, dashboards, loyalty, and push marketing. Back-office capabilities also cover disputes, collections, and risk management. A relational database consolidates customer and transaction information for profiling and segmentation. PowerCARD Connect offers more than 120 APIs for third-party systems to access data and services or trigger services. HPS describes on-premises and SaaS delivery for its suite, with SaaS hosted on a public or private cloud. Pricing is available on request.

Lithic is an issuer processing platform for businesses building card programs, moving money, and managing program operations. It supports debit, prepaid, charge, and revolving credit programs with physical, virtual, and tokenized cards. Authorization rules can restrict spending by merchant category, amount, transaction velocity, time of day, and other criteria. Lithic connects to Visa, Mastercard, and American Express through one processing integration, and provides ACH transfers, virtual and routable accounts, Federal Reserve connectivity, and ledger-based reconciliation. Identity and fraud tools include KYC/KYB workflows, 3DS authentication, shadow mode, backtesting, and client decisioning through Authorization Stream Access. Program services can include sponsor-bank operations, network onboarding, regulatory compliance, card fulfillment, reporting, and 24/7/365 cardholder support across chat, email, phone, and IVR. The platform is available through API and web. Each account includes a free Sandbox API key for development and testing; production access requires an account enabled for that environment. Pricing is by custom quote, based on transaction volume and required features.