U.S. Core Processor Market Analysis

Core processors are the infrastructure behind every card swipe, but their role is often misunderstood. A transaction flows from the merchant’s terminal to the network, which routes it to the processor that decides whether to approve or decline it, checking the account and applying authorization rules in milliseconds. Without that layer there is no authorization, no clearing, no payment. This report explains what core processors do, how the market has evolved across three generations, and when it makes sense to go direct, with profiles of ten leading providers: CoreCard, Episode Six, Galileo, Highnote, i2c, Lithic, Marqeta, Qolo, Stripe, and Zeta.

How a core processor differs from a program manager

Most new card programs start with a program manager, a bundled platform wrapping the core processor together with banking sponsorship, compliance, servicing, and fulfillment. A core processor is the layer underneath: the system with a direct connection to the payment networks (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and debit networks like Shazam and Pulse) that checks the ledger for available funds or credit and returns an approval or decline. A program manager gets a team to market faster with less upfront capital; going direct trades that speed for control over authorization rules and ledger design, plus owning functions like vendor management and compliance. Totavi advises teams through exactly this decision as part of our technology development and advisory work.

Three generations of core processors

First-generation processors, including Fiserv, FIS, Jack Henry, and TSYS, run on mainframe infrastructure built for an era of physical banking: robust, but rigid. Second-generation providers such as CoreCard, Galileo, i2c, and Marqeta, founded between the late 1990s and 2010, added APIs and virtualized infrastructure for prepaid cards and digital wallets. The current, third generation, including Episode Six, Highnote, Lithic, Qolo, Stripe, and Zeta, is cloud-native from the ground up. Age alone is not a quality signal, but the shift has opened card issuing to non-bank platforms, from B2B tools like Ramp and Brex to consumer brands like Chime and Bilt, that once needed a chartered bank’s own infrastructure to issue a card.

What the data shows

Core processing is concentrated at the top. Industry analysis puts the top six global core processors at more than $17.1 billion in combined revenue in 2022, the majority in legacy platforms. In 2024, Global Payments reported $2.48 billion in revenue from its TSYS-based Issuer Solutions segment alone, roughly a quarter of the company’s total revenue. Among modern platforms, Marqeta processed $291 billion in volume and earned $507 million in revenue in 2024, SoFi’s Galileo (including Technisys) brought in $395.2 million across 168 million enabled accounts, and Stripe has issued more than 300 million cards since launching its issuing business in 2018. Totavi estimates the total U.S. core processor market at $8 to $9 billion in 2025, split between roughly $6.5 billion in traditional processing and $1.5 billion in modern platforms, a 15 to 20 percent modern share that’s up from under 10 percent just a few years ago.

Where the core processor market is headed

We project the market will grow to $15 billion by 2034, a 6.5 percent compound annual growth rate in real terms, as modern platforms grow roughly fivefold, from $1.5 billion to $7.5 billion, reaching parity with legacy providers for the first time. Credit remains the most lucrative segment, generating 45 to 50 percent of revenue on a smaller transaction share, while non-traditional issuers, marketplaces, gig platforms, and software companies extend the market well beyond banks. The report closes with guidance on when to launch with a program manager versus go direct, the signals a program is ready to migrate, and why building an in-house processor, as Chime eventually did after a 2019 vendor outage, is rarely the right call outside a handful of companies for whom processing is the core business.

For related market analysis, see Totavi’s Debit Card Program Management Platform Market Analysis, Credit Card Program Management Platform Market Analysis, Data Aggregator Market Analysis, and Disbursement Cards Market Analysis, or browse the full research library.