Payments giant Visa Inc V has launched a new crypto advisory practice to help its partners “navigate a new era of money movement.”
What Happened: Visa said its global crypto advisory practice would form a new part of its Visa Consulting & Analytics (VCA) division and would be designed to help its clients and partners advance their own crypto journey.
“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,” said Carl Rutstein, Global Head, Visa Consulting & Analytics. Visa is engaging with clients and partners in every region, including the U.S., where Visa’s team is working with UMB Financial Corp UMBF.
“We came to Visa to learn more about digital currency and the use cases that are most relevant for various business lines as we serve our customers in the years ahead,” said Uma Wilson, executive vice president, chief information and product officer at UMB Bank.“VCA helped us begin to explore a roadmap of a strategy – from product and partner selection to cross-functional considerations such as Technology, Finance, Risk, and Compliance.”
Visa expects to leverage its work with over 60 crypto platforms to build a network of seasoned product experts and consultants to help financial institutions evaluate the crypto opportunity.
In August, Visa made waves in the blockchain community after the payments company acquired a CryptoPunk non-fungible token (NFT) for $150,000.
At the time, the firm’s head of crypto, Cuy Sheffield, said that Visa was now "committing to starting to help clients navigate ways that they can participate in the NFT commerce ecosystem."
A November report revealed that the leading digital asset Bitcoin BTC/USD was on track to settle at least $45 trillion on its own cryptocurrency network in 2021 alone, equating to four times Visa’s transaction volumes.
Price Action: On Wednesday, Bitcoin was trading at $49,200, down 3.36% in the last 24 hours. Over the past seven days, the cryptocurrency was has lost 14.47% of its value.
Visa shares traded 0.47% higher during the pre-market session.
Related Link: Mastercard Launches Crypto-Linked Credit, Debit Cards For Asia Pacific Region
Photo: André François McKenzie on Unsplash
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