When a card issuer dispatches a physical card, the cardholder enters a period of uncertainty — they know a card is coming, but have no way to gauge when it will arrive. Varmo models this journey as a series of discrete lifecycle stages, each with a correspondingDocumentation Index
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status value that you can surface in your product. Understanding the lifecycle helps you set accurate cardholder expectations and intervene proactively when deliveries go off track.
Lifecycle stages
Each card tracked by Varmo moves through a defined set of statuses. Varmo infers the current status from dispatch metadata and its regional latency model — not from carrier scan events.| Status | Meaning | Typical duration |
|---|---|---|
dispatched | The card has left the issuer’s fulfilment centre and entered the postal network. | Hours to 1 day |
in_transit | The card is moving through the postal network toward its destination. | 1–5 days |
out_for_delivery | The card is with the local delivery agent and is expected to arrive today. | Same day |
delivered | Varmo’s model indicates the card has reached its destination. | — |
exception | An anomaly has been detected — for example, the card has not progressed as expected within the predicted window. | Ongoing until resolved |
The dead zone problem
Standard postal services rarely provide real-time tracking for standard-class card mail. Once a card leaves the fulfilment centre, issuers have no direct visibility into where it is or when it will arrive. This gap — the period between dispatch and delivery — creates a poor cardholder experience: support contact rates rise, activation is delayed, and trust in the issuer erodes. Varmo solves this by combining the dispatch date and destination location with continuously updated ground-truth postal data. Rather than waiting for a carrier to emit a scan event, Varmo uses regional latency patterns derived from historical delivery outcomes to infer where in the journey a card most likely is at any given moment.How status transitions work
Varmo evaluates two inputs from your dispatch event: thedispatch_date and the destination postal_code paired with country_code. These are matched against Varmo’s regional latency model — a dataset built from ground-truth delivery records across postal regions — to compute the expected time for each stage of the journey.
As time elapses relative to the dispatch date, Varmo advances the inferred status through the lifecycle. When elapsed time or pattern anomalies fall outside the expected range for a given postal region, Varmo transitions the card to exception.
The
status field in the API response reflects Varmo’s inference based on regional postal data. It is not derived from a carrier scan event and should be presented to cardholders accordingly.