Marqeta has been making moves to add new revenue sources in addition to Jack Dorsey’s Block, which for years has accounted for more than half of its total revenue. Mike Milotich, the company’s latest chief and the
The plan, he told American Banker, is diversification through growth, a task easier said than done against the backdrop of macroeconomic and
“We want to diversify by growing our non-Block business. We try to tell investors: ‘Judge us on our non-Block growth, not on the percentage of our revenue that’s Block,'” Milotich said.
Broadly, flexible planning and an emphasis on execution will help Marqeta as an organization reach those goals, he said. The fintech has started planning in quarterly chunks, with mid-quarter check-ins to assess market conditions. “We’re trying to emphasize execution more. We have tended, in my opinion, to actually chase a little too many shiny objects at once and in the past.”
Specifically, Marqeta is looking to broaden its customer base with new products, Milotich said, including an expansion into credit card issuing, the addition of more value-added services, such as tokenization and risk services, and new program management services, where Marqeta
“Before, [program management services] used to be more of a bundle, and now we’re breaking them up into more a la carte services, which allows our customers a little more flexibility to pick and choose,” he said.
The card issuing fintech is also looking to expand abroad, with its
Analysts so far have been pleased with Marqeta’s progress. The company beat analysts’ estimates on revenue, which landed at $139 million for the quarter ended March 30, 2025, ahead of an expected $135 million. Net income also beat expectations, coming in at a $1.7 million loss, ahead of an estimated loss of $34 million.
“Non-Block [total payment volume] saw continued strength and little to no macro-disruption”, Keybanc Capital Markets analyst Alex Markgraff wrote in a research note following the company’s first-quarter earnings.
“On the new business front, Marqeta had positive updates across Europe (TPV growth 100%+) and credit. On the flip side the Company announced Varo has decided to terminate its planned migration to Marqeta,” Markgraff said. “We view the print as generally positive with respect to new-business, non-Block growth, and macro-related resilience to date. Non-Block TPV grew roughly twice as fast as Block.”
Block-related revenue was less than half – 45% – of Marqeta’s total revenue at the end of the quarter, down from 74% at the end of 2022.
But Marqeta’s biggest bets to increase the diversity of its clientele revolve around creating tools that make doing business with the fintech easier. Launching a card program is anything but a low lift task, and program migrations are both costly and require heavy resource investment that many companies are reluctant to undertake.
To that end, Marqeta is launching a white label app that will allow customers to stand up a card program without heavy integration, Milotich said.
“What we’re hearing from a number of prospects is, ‘I’m the decision maker on this card program, but the person who controls the roadmap for the people who manage our app, that’s a different part of the organization, and getting on that roadmap can be challenging,'” he said. “What we’re really trying to do is remove that barrier.”
The white label app will allow customers to establish a track record for the card program without having to go through the process of embedding Marqeta’s solution into its app or website right out the gate,
The white label app is built with the tools that power its UX Toolkit, a selection of application programming interfaces released in 2024 that are designed to allow customers to more easily embed the card solutions into their app or website. At its core, the white label app is a time-to-market tool.
“It really makes it much quicker for an established company to launch a card program because they can just take our app off the shelf and just make it look like they want it to look and not have to coordinate with lots of other groups inside the company,” Milotich said.
Marqeta is also looking to productize program migrations on the heels of its successful debit card migration with Klarna in Europe, Milotich said.
“Last year, when we agreed with Klarna to migrate millions of cards in Europe over to our platform, we said, ‘While we’re doing this, let’s build a product that allows this to be repeatable,'” Milotich said. “If we sort of build these muscles and we start creating a list of customers who we’ve executed for who were very happy and would be willing to tell others … then we think more people may be willing to move to a more modern platform like ours.”
Marqeta is hoping to capitalize on what it says is a forthcoming wave of modernization coming to card issuing, similar to the wave of modernization that happened seven to 10 years ago with the boom of e-commerce and omni-commerce.
“This wave of modernization is coming on the issuing side, which means, instead of just hunting for new programs that are launching, we can actually go to companies that may already have well-established large programs and say, ‘Let’s educate you about maybe some of the things you could do differently if you were on a platform like ours,'” he said.
Cristopher Kennedy, an analyst with William Blair believes that Marqeta is on the right track, he said in a research note following the company’s earnings earlier this month.
“We believe the
“Further, after the launch delays experienced in 2024, the company remains focused on accelerating timelines, and plans to introduce a standalone white label app that enables brands to launch card programs more expediently, with less resource constraints,” according to the research note.
But not all investors share the same optimism. J Capital Research, an investment advisory firm with a short position against Marqeta, revealed in a
“The Marqeta house of cards may come tumbling down: an FBI investigation could prompt MQ to lose up to 70% of its business,” the report said. “If Sutton folds or pulls out of the partnership, we think MQ will shrink to a mere shadow of itself. Former executives with several years managing MQ’s relationship with Sutton say a switch would take years and is practically impossible.”
The Federal Deposit Insurance Company issued a
Sanjay Sakhrani, an analyst with Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, called J Capital’s report “misleading.”
“Our read-through of the report yields a view that while the points create a mosaic that reads like a solid bear thesis on the company, many of the points are facts that we already know,” Sakhrani said. “It is clear MQ faces challenges with its concentration risk and the associated macro and regulatory challenges; this is a big part of why the stock has not performed well and quite frankly why we remain Market Perform-rated.”
