No Activation

When the card is usable without any cardholder-side activation step, either because it ships active or because you display it yourself.

When the card is usable without any cardholder-side activation step, either because it ships active or because you display it yourself.

There are two scenarios where no cardholder activation flow is needed. Activation profiles do not apply to either.

Physical cards, active on arrival

Physical cards ordered through the standard physical-card issuance flow ship in an active state. As soon as the recipient has the card in hand, they can spend — no activation step, no cardholder portal sign-up required.

This is the right fit when you're bulk shipping cards to a location for in person distribution or when you're mailing pre-loaded cards to recipients who don't need to prove identity to spend, and you don't want to require them to interact with a GiveCard portal or link at all.

Virtual cards, displayed in your own portal via iframe

If you want to provision virtual cards instantly and show the card details (PAN, CVV, expiry) inside your own portal instead of sending cardholders to GiveCard's cardholder portal, use the no activation path with our Card Viewer SDK. You own the entire display experience.

Two prerequisites before you can use this path:

1. Ask GiveCard to enable iframe integration for your business. This is a one-time setup you have to explicitly request from your GiveCard contact (or reach out to [email protected]). Without it, the flow below will not work end-to-end.
2. Use the specific endpoint that supports this delivery method. Issue the card with POST /v1/cards/issueSingle, setting deliveryMethod to none. Other virtual-card issuance endpoints do not support this path.

Once those are in place, the flow is:

1. Issue the card with POST /v1/cards/issueSingle, deliveryMethod: "none". GiveCard creates the card in an immediately active state and returns the card record.
2. Call POST /v1/cards/{cardId}/clientToken to get a short-lived token and paymentCardId pair.
3. Pass the token and paymentCardId into GiveCard's Card Viewer SDK inside an iframe on your own domain. The SDK renders the card details securely without them ever touching your servers.

Cardholders on this path do not have access to GiveCard's cardholder portal. You are responsible for surfacing everything they need (card details, balance, transactions) inside your own UI, using the appropriate GiveCard endpoints.