Credit card giant Visa has opened an entirely new division designed to provide cryptocurrency advisory services to companies looking to get involved in the growing financial arena.
Visa Is Offering Crypto Advice
The irony of the situation is that Visa provides users with one of the biggest payment options available today. All one needs to do is sign up, go through a quick background check, and boom! They can get their new card mailed to them granted there isn’t anything inhibiting their finances. Upon receiving the card, they can walk into any store that accepts Visa and use the card to buy goods and services.
But crypto was initially designed to serve as a payment tool, which has been a hard journey for those looking to take advantage of crypto’s growing stamina. The goal behind bitcoin and many of its altcoin counterparts is that they would eventually push credit cards, fiat, and checks to the side, and serve as the world’s primary payment methods. This has been slow to materialize, however, given that bitcoin and many of its cousins are extremely volatile.
Thus, many retailers and stores have said “no” to accepting crypto payments, and to an extent, we can’t blame them. Consider this scenario: a customer walks into a retail outlet and purchases $50 worth of materials in bitcoin. For one reason or another, the store in question fails to transfer the bitcoin into fiat over the course of 24 hours. By that time, the price of bitcoin falls, meaning that $50 is now worth $30. The customer still gets to keep everything they bought, but the store has clearly lost money.
Is that a fair situation? Not everyone thinks so, and thus bitcoin and crypto payments are only being slowly realized and accepted by a small handful of companies here and there. This is what makes the present scenario so intriguing… The idea that a credit card company – something that crypto was designed to overtake – is now offering crypto advisory services really sets up the playing field for a financial future in which all payment tools work in tandem rather than replacing each other.
The services will be aimed towards banks and retailers. Visa initially felt it was time to offer these services following a survey that suggested approximately 40 percent of crypto-holding Americans would switch banks if the new institutions were willing to provide crypto custody and related tools.
Could This Make the Company Bigger?
Claudio Di Nella – head of Visa’s consulting and analytics in Europe – stated in an interview:
We’ve seen a material shift in our clients’ mindset in the last year, from a desire to explore and experiment with crypto, to actually building a strategy and product roadmap.
Visa stock is currently trading at $207 per unit, though Morningstar analyst Brett Horn feels its new crypto services may cause the stock to surge to $217.