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The Gift Card API for Issuing Your Own Branded Cards
Most gift card APIs help you resell someone else's cards. Highnote helps you issue your own. As the unified platform for embedded finance, Highnote helps startups and enterprises move faster and differentiate. Our gift card API issues open-loop, network-branded prepaid cards: your brand, your rules, your ledger.
Your Gift Card Should Be a Card Program
Most gift card APIs are catalogs. You call them, they deliver someone else's closed-loop card, and your brand becomes a line item on the confirmation email.
That model limits what you can own and control: the brand experience, program-level spend rules, transaction visibility, and the issuance workflow. You're investing in someone else's payment product instead of building your own.
If you're evaluating gift card APIs, you're really making a decision about card infrastructure. We built gift card issuance as a full card program: open-loop, network-branded prepaid cards governed on one unified platform. It is issuing infrastructure, not a reseller agreement.
What Highnote Gives You
Open-loop, network-branded prepaid cards
Issue virtual, physical, or tokenized cards under your brand, spendable anywhere the network is accepted. Your recipients carry your card, not a catalog item.
API-driven issuance
Create and deliver cards programmatically when they are earned, purchased, or granted, without relying on manual batch workflows.
Spend and velocity controls
Set merchant category, amount, and frequency rules at the program level. Rules are enforced before authorization, rather than applied after a transaction occurs.
Web and mobile push provisioning
Push cards to Apple Pay and Google Pay in your app, and to Apple Pay from the web, so recipients add them in one tap without typing card details.
One ledger for the whole program
Every issuance, load, and transaction posts to the unified real-time ledger, so finance reconciles the entire program at the transaction level.
Why Issuing Beats Aggregating
We built gift cards on issuing infrastructure so that your program is an asset, not a reseller agreement.
| Capability | Aggregator API |  |
|---|---|---|
| Brand | Catalog brand or limited customization | Yours |
| Card | Typically closed loop | Open loop |
| Spend | Merchant-limited | Network-wide |
| Controls | Catalog-dependent | Program-level rules |
| Ledger | Separate reporting environment | Unified |
| Data | Provider-defined visibility | Transaction-level program visibility |
| Infrastructure | Catalog distribution | Issuing platform |
With an aggregator, the provider controls the catalog, card experience, and available data model. You are distributing within its infrastructure. On Highnote, branded prepaid programs run as first-class card programs: account holders, financial accounts, and cards operate on one unified ledger, with program management and compliance oversight built into the platform.
Issuing, acquiring, credit, and a real-time ledger on one system means the program you launch today runs on the same infrastructure as every payment product you build next.
How Platforms Use This
Rewards and incentives platforms
Issue branded incentive cards programmatically as users earn them, with gift card program management rules governing where and how every card spends.
Refunds and store credit
Ecommerce brands can issue open-loop credit as an alternative to ACH refunds, keeping the brand in the customer's wallet and the funds on one ledger.
Employee recognition and corporate disbursements
Companies issue branded prepaid cards for recognition, rewards, and spot bonuses, with every transaction reconciled against a single program ledger.
Think Beyond Gift Cards
Don't settle for a place in someone else's catalog. Build a payment product your customers carry, your finance team controls, and your brand owns. Build your card program on one unified platform.