Visa Pilots System to Help Banks Provide Crypto Services Including Buying, Trading, Custody of Bitcoin

Visa is piloting a new system to enable banks to seamlessly integrate crypto features. Using Visa’s crypto APIs, banks can offer a number of cryptocurrency services to their customers, including the buying, trading, and custody of bitcoin.

• Visa announced Wednesday a partnership with First Boulevard, a digitally native neobank focused on serving the Black community. The bank will be the first to pilot Visa’s new suite of crypto APIs.

• “As part of the initial pilot program, Visa plans to enable First Boulevard to connect to infrastructure provided by Visa’s partner, Anchorage, a federally chartered digital asset bank, to allow their customers to buy and sell bitcoin,” the payments giant explained. Customers of the bank will be able to “purchase, custody and trade digital assets” held by Anchorage. First Boulevard will also launch a Visa debit card.

• The crypto API development marks the next phase of Visa’s digital currency strategy. The global payments giant explained that the product will “help additional Visa clients access and integrate crypto features into their product offering, and is anticipated to launch later this year.”

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• Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product officer, commented: “With this pilot program, we want to extend the value of Visa to our neobank and financial institution clients by providing an easy bridge to crypto assets and blockchain networks.” He further described: “We set out to make Visa the bridge between digital currencies and our global network of 70 million merchants and today we are the leading network for crypto wallets with 35 crypto platforms choosing to issue with Visa.”

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