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Before you can issue a card, the cardholder must be a Grid Customer in good standing with a funded internal account. This page covers the requirements and the order they must be satisfied in.

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KYC must be APPROVED

POST /cards is rejected with 400 CARDHOLDER_KYC_NOT_APPROVED if the cardholder’s kycStatus is anything other than APPROVED. There is no “issue and verify later” path. If you’re a regulated platform that creates customers directly with KYC data, the customer reaches APPROVED as soon as the verification returns approved. If you’re using the hosted KYC link flow, gate issuance on the CUSTOMER.KYC_APPROVED webhook.

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The cardholder needs a funding source

Every card must be bound to one InternalAccount at issue time. The account must:
  • Belong to the cardholder (no cross-customer funding in v1).
  • Be denominated in a card-eligible currency. In v1 this is USDB; the request is rejected with 400 FUNDING_SOURCE_INELIGIBLE otherwise.
If the cardholder doesn’t have an internal account yet, internal accounts are created automatically when the customer is created based on your platform configuration. You can list them with:

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Pre-fund before authorizations arrive

Grid does not check the funding source balance when it decides an authorization. An authorization against an underfunded source is approved to the card network, and the pull against the funding source fails afterwards. The transaction resolves as EXCEPTION for you to reconcile, and it carries no cardDeclinedReason, because nothing was declined. Fund the source the same way you would for any other internal account — via the funding payment instructions or, in Sandbox, with /sandbox/internal-accounts/{id}/fund.
Just-in-time funding works the same as for other Grid flows: receive a deposit into the funding source, let it confirm, then expect the cardholder to transact. There is no separate JIT path for cards in v1.

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Ready to issue

Once the cardholder is APPROVED and a funded internal account exists, issue the card with POST /cards. See Issuing cards for the request shape and lifecycle states.