What you cannot outsource: the build-versus-buy decision in card issuing

For most of the past two decades, the build-versus-buy question in card issuing had a settled answer for everyone but the largest institutions. Building a program meant standing up the full apparatus of modern lending — origination and decisioning, statement and letter production, card manufacture and fulfillment, settlement and reconciliation, fraud systems, dispute handling — and carrying the compliance weight of all of it. For a community bank or mid-sized institution, the honest counsel was usually to refer the relationship out and collect a fee. That answer has come loose, and the reasons pull in opposite directions.