MijnEvent or Stadsie for your city card? The question that matters: where does the money sit

More and more municipalities, business associations and BIZ foundations want their own city card: one local voucher, redeemable at all participating businesses. When choosing a platform, the conversation quickly turns to features — scanning apps, balance pages, top-ups. All relevant. But since the summer of 2025, one question belongs at the top of every list of requirements: where does the money sit?

In this article we compare our own Gift cards & city cards module with Stadsie, one of the better-known providers of local gift cards in the Netherlands. Not because Stadsie is doing anything wrong — more on that below — but because the two differ fundamentally on exactly that one point: where the card balance sits between purchase and spending.

The lesson of Groupcard: €14 million evaporated

Let's rewind. For years, Groupcard was a major player behind local gift passes in the Netherlands. Municipalities handed out the passes — often paid for with public money — to volunteers, informal carers and residents on a tight budget. On 1 July 2025, Groupcard B.V. was declared bankrupt; its sister companies followed three weeks later. A relaunch failed. The damage: roughly €14 million in balances, spread across more than a hundred municipalities — about one in three Dutch municipalities, according to the association of Dutch municipalities (VNG). Passes that worked fine one day were worthless the next.

Two details make this bankruptcy extra painful — and extra instructive:

1. There was a third-party account. The balances were held by a separate foundation, Stichting Derdengelden Groupcard — on paper exactly the construction that should have protected cardholders and shopkeepers. The court-appointed administrator concluded, however, that the foundation's money appears to have been used for years to cover the company's own losses. The protection existed on paper, not in practice.
2. The licence was missing. Anyone managing other people's balances at this scale needs an e-money institution licence from the Dutch central bank (DNB). Groupcard didn't have one — and never even applied.

The lesson is not "this one company did a bad job". The lesson is structural: as soon as card balances sit centrally with a platform or its foundation, you depend on how well that platform manages them — and from the outside you have almost no visibility into that. A third-party foundation is a promise. Groupcard proved it is not a guarantee.

Two fundamentally different models

Stadsie is a card platform. It issues gift cards for twelve cities (including Eindhoven, Breda, Tilburg and Den Bosch) plus an umbrella Stadsie gift card, with over a thousand participating shops and hospitality venues. Sales run through the central Stadsie web shop, and according to Stadsie's own helpdesk the balance is managed "safely and independently" through a third-party funds foundation. Payouts to participating businesses therefore run through the platform: the shopkeeper waits for money that sits with that central foundation.

MijnEvent is not a card network, but software. Your organisation — the municipality, the business association, the BIZ — issues its own card under its own name, for example the "Meppeler Stadspas", on its own order page. Residents buy or top up with iDEAL | Wero, shops redeem with their own scanning app, and you keep the overview. What that looks like in practice is covered in A city voucher for your town.

So the difference is not the idea — both want to keep spending power local — but the division of roles: do you join a platform's card, or do you issue your own card using platform software?

The money flow at MijnEvent: never through us, never through a foundation

This is how every euro moves in our city card module:

1. A resident buys a card (or tops one up) and pays with iDEAL | Wero. The amount lands directly on the issuing organisation's own Mollie account — and from there on its own bank account. Mollie is a payment service provider regulated by the Dutch central bank.
2. MijnEvent only settles its module fee automatically through Mollie. At no point do we hold the balance.
3. A shop scans the card and redeems an amount. In the dashboard you see, per shop, exactly what has been spent and what needs to be paid out.
4. The issuing organisation pays the shops itself, from its own account — ticked off with one click, and the shop is notified automatically.

At no moment in this process does the money sit with MijnEvent, on a pooled account or with an intermediary foundation. It is the same principle as our ticketing: managing other people's money is a payment service, and that does not belong with a software platform.

Does the issuing organisation need a licence of its own, then?

A fair follow-up question. The balance sits with your organisation — does that make you a bank of sorts?

First, a misconception to clear up: before spending, the balance is not "the shops' money". At that moment, no shop has any claim yet. The balance is a debt to the card holder; only when someone pays at the bookshop does that shop's claim come into existence — and from that moment, the payout overview shows exactly who is owed what. That is how every prepaid instrument works, from national gift vouchers to any city pass.

For the licence question, payment legislation contains an exclusion designed precisely for this kind of voucher: the limited network exclusion (PSD2, implemented in the Dutch Financial Supervision Act). A payment instrument that can only be used within a limited network of providers — every shop has a direct contract with the issuer, the network is confined to one town centre or area, the card cannot be exchanged for cash — falls outside the licence requirement; the Dutch central bank itself lists gift cards and store cards as examples. One hard limit to know: if the total transaction value exceeds €1 million per twelve months, a notification duty to DNB applies, and DNB then assesses whether the network really is "limited".

The float — the balance that sits on your account between purchase and spending — also comes with management duties. It is not freely spendable money; using it as working capital was exactly the mistake that killed Groupcard. Three rules keep the management healthy:

1. A separate account or earmarked balance, always covering 100% of the outstanding card balances.
2. A fixed, short payout rhythm towards the shops (monthly, for example).
3. Checks by your own audit committee, board or council — the bank balance must reconcile with the balance records in the dashboard at any moment.

Important: this is general information, not legal advice — do not take it as established truth. Whether the exclusion applies in your situation depends on the precise design of your programme. Always have it reviewed by a legal professional (or put it to DNB) before you launch. What we can say with certainty is where the money sits: with you.

Why a second Groupcard cannot happen here

At Groupcard, €14 million evaporated because one central party managed the balances of more than a hundred municipalities at once. If that one party falls over, everything falls over.

In the MijnEvent model, that central pot simply does not exist. The balance of the Meppel city pass sits with the issuer in Meppel; the balance of a card in Assen sits with the issuer in Assen. If MijnEvent ceased to exist tomorrow, that would be annoying for the software — but the money and the balance records are already with your organisation. The party that issued the card and holds the residents' trust is the same party that holds the money. A platform bankruptcy cannot touch the value of the cards, because the platform never held that value in the first place.

That makes this model not only safer, but also more future-proof. A city card is a long-term commitment — ten years or more — and in that period anything can happen: platforms change course, get acquired or disappear. The only setup that survives all of those scenarios is the one where the money is always in your own possession. Whatever happens: your balance records and your bank balance simply remain yours, and the management can be checked by your own board, audit committee or municipal council — not by an administrator after the fact. In our article on the Groupcard bankruptcy we lay the two money flows side by side, step by step.

The honest downside: your treasurer gets a new chore

In all fairness: issuing your own card has one downside. Because the money sits with your organisation, your organisation also does the payouts. So the treasurer of the business association or BIZ gets a recurring chore: paying the participating shops. The dashboard keeps that chore as small as possible — the outstanding amount per shop is ready and waiting, ticking it off takes one click and the shop is notified automatically — but it remains work that a central card platform would take off your hands.

In return, that same treasurer never again has to wait and see what someone else does with the money: no payout schedules of an external party, no digging through the annual accounts of somebody else's foundation. And frankly: we have yet to meet the first treasurer who loses sleep over money sitting in the organisation's own account. 😉

The comparison at a glance

To be clear: this article does not claim that Stadsie is in financial trouble or will be — there is no indication of that whatsoever. This is about the architecture of the money flow: who depends on whom, and what happens if a platform — any platform — ever fails. Groupcard had a third-party foundation too. The question is not whether a provider has such a construction, but whether you need a construction at all in which your money sits with someone else.

What Stadsie does well

Credit where it is due: Stadsie has built an impressive network. Over a thousand participating shops and hospitality venues, more than a hundred thousand cards in circulation and over €4 million in local spending. The cards are deliberately redeemable only at local businesses — no chains — and we wholeheartedly share that principle. If you want to join an existing, proven card network quickly and have no objection to the balance being managed centrally by the platform, it is a perfectly reasonable choice.

Our conviction is simply that a local card is only truly local when the money is local too — from the first second, not only after payout.

Six questions for any provider (including us)

Choosing a platform for your city card — whichever one — ask these questions. A good provider answers them without hesitation:

1. Where exactly does the balance sit? With which legal entity, on which account?
2. Who runs that entity and who supervises it?
3. Is there a DNB licence, or does an exemption apply? Groupcard had neither in order.
4. What happens to balances and payouts if the platform stops?
5. How often and how quickly are shopkeepers paid — and who executes that?
6. Can the issuing organisation access the records in real time?

Our answers: the balance sits with your organisation on your own account (1), you run and audit it yourself (2), for MijnEvent the licence question does not arise — we manage no third-party money and payments run through the regulated Mollie — while for the issuer the limited network exclusion typically applies, see above, and that too is something to have reviewed by a legal professional (3), if the platform stops, money and records are already with you (4), you set your own payout rhythm towards shops (5), and the dashboard shows every sale, redemption and outstanding payout in real time (6).

Issue your own city card?

The Gift cards & city cards module can be activated on request. Are you involved with a municipality, business association or BIZ and do you choose the safe, future-proof route — with the money always in your own possession, whatever happens? Have a look at the module page or get in touch, and we will think along about the setup for your town centre.