Visa is taking a new approach to its payment business that will involve incorporating cryptocurrency to facilitate cheaper and faster cross-border payments. This is coming a month after Amazon cut ties with Visa UK, over high cost of transaction fees.
In an interview with NDTV, Cuy Sheffield, Visa’s head of crypto, said the payments giant has partnered with about 60 leading crypto platforms “to launch card programs that make it easy for consumers to convert and spend digital currency at 80 million merchant locations worldwide.”
“We’ve built a lot of momentum in this space, and we’ll continue to support the crypto ecosystem in several ways,” he said.
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In November, Visa suffered a huge blow following Amazon’s decision to no longer accept UK-issued Visa credit cards from Jan. 2022. Amazon said that technology advancement should be making payment processing fees reduced, instead of increasing it.
Visa’s rival, Mastercard, has been onboarding crypto firms to accommodate the effects of decentralized finance (DeFi), which has removed the cost emanating from intermediary fees on processed transactions. Visa appears to have learned a vital lesson from Amazon’s incident, and it is therefore speeding the pace to tag along the blockchain-powered crypto industry that is changing the world’s financial ecosystem.
“At Visa, the scale and scope of our work in crypto has grown dramatically. The number of people cross-functionally at Visa working on crypto in some capacity is now in the hundreds — up from just a handful of employees. And we’ve more than doubled our number of partnerships with crypto platforms in the last 18 months — up to 60 partnerships today,” Sheffield said.
He explained that Visa has partnered with more than 60 of the leading crypto platforms, like FTX, Blockfi, Crypto.com, Coinbase, and Binance, to launch card programs that make it easy for consumers to convert and spend digital currency at 80 million merchant locations worldwide.
“Crypto-linked cards make it easy for consumers to convert and spend digital currencies, without requiring coffee shops, dry cleaners, or grocery stores to directly accept crypto at the checkout,” he continued. “All the conversions from crypto to fiat happen instantly, behind the scenes. In-store, online, it’s as easy as a standard Visa transaction,” he said.
Visa announced the launch of its crypto advisory services in early December, which is expected to be available in territories where its payments services are available.
India is a huge market for Visa, but the government has been making moves to outlaw cryptocurrency, following China’s steps. The situation poses a big challenge to Visa’s crypto incorporation plan.
When asked if Visa’s crypto services will cover India, Sheffield said that “Visa aims to provide our crypto advisory services to clients globally wherever there is interest, and currently, we offer services in markets where the regulations permit such transactions.”
Sheffield said Visa will build on existing crypto momentum that it has garnered to serve its network booming with millions of merchants.
“At the end of the day, we want to serve as a bridge connecting the crypto ecosystem with our global network of 80 million merchant locations and more than 15,000 financial institutions,” he said.