During a Fortune’s Leadership Next podcast, Visa CEO Al Kelly (Photo courtesy ©Visa Inc. All rights reserved) announced the company’s intention to support Bitcoin payments. The plan is to make it possible to buy Bitcoin using Visa credentials and work with Bitcoin wallets to allow this cryptocurrency to be converted into a regular currency, the type called fiat in jargon, to be used wherever a Visa credit card is accepted. Al Kelly’s statements come a few weeks after an announcement by Mastercard that it intends to include cryptocurrencies in its payment network.
During the podcast, Al Kelly talked about many topics but starting from the problems created by the Covid-19 pandemic to many small businesses he expressed the opinion that the use of cash and checks will decline due to the pandemic. The consequence, according to Al Kelly, is the need especially for businesses affected by the crisis to accelerate the adoption of digital payments. The big news is that Visa doesn’t intend to simply improve the existing tools to support credit card payments but to extend their potential to also support payments in Bitcoin and perhaps also in other cryptocurrencies.
Al Kelly didn’t go into details and just made a few references that may concern the so-called stablecoins, cryptocurrencies based on mechanisms that keep their value stable over time, as opposed to Bitcoin, a currency subject to speculation. Despite this definition, Al Kelly explicitly spoke of a Bitcoin support with the possibility of buying this cryptocurrency using your own Visa credentials and of using Bitcoin for purchases in the Visa circuit.
No details regarding the timeline and other requirements for the cryptocurrency adoption were revealed but within a little over a month, a Mastercard release and statements from Visa’s CEO show that the leading credit card companies don’t intend to stand by and watch the cryptocurrencies’ growth. Al Kelly stated that he can’t say if this spread is a fad or it will be mainstream in five years, but evidently, the plan for Visa is to prepare for mass adoption.
In the course of 2021, we will be able to see the start of the use of cryptocurrencies through channels hitherto reserved for common currencies with the main credit card companies while PayPal is expanding its support in various countries around the world. Even traditionalist banks that we can consider dinosaurs in the world of finance are now starting to support cryptocurrencies. If you can’t beat them, join them!
