After Coinbase made history as the first company in the crypto industry to obtain Visa principal membership much earlier this year, the credit card and payments behemoth has approved UK-based crypto card company Wirex for the same membership. This will allow the company to directly issue Visa-backed cards and process customer transactions without having to go through a third-party card payments and services company.
Wirex is part of Visa’s native startup incubator, the Fintech Fast Track Programme, and managed to secure the membership after the programme was successfully concluded. It issued a Visa debit card back in 2014 as well, and were one of the pioneers of allowing Bitcoin rewards to be given to users for purchases made on the card.
“It’s been our core goal to unite the traditional and digital economies, and collaborations with trusted global payments companies such as Visa are making this possible by providing straight and cost-effective solutions for utilising crypto in the everyday. It’s no easy feat to achieve principal membership, and will present numerous opportunities to continue developing a revolutionary product,” said Wirex CEO Pavel Matveev.
The number of crypto exchanges onboarded on Wirex’s platform grew almost three-fold this year, and with players from the traditional payments space such as PayPal venturing into cryptocurrency, it is more important than ever for Wirex to enable access of its services to the mass public, which will be better facilitated by Wirex as a Visa principal member.
