Former Visa CEO Moves To Cryptocurrency Startup Crypterium
Former Visa UK and Ireland CEO Marc O’ Brien last week announced during an interview that he will be moving to a cryptocurrency startup called Crypterium as the CEO.
O’Brien who has been the CEO of Visa UK for six years noted during the interview that his team is making efforts to expose the adoption of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether as currencies and legal payment method by permitting users to use cryptocurrencies to process their everyday payments.
He noted:
“The idea is that cryptocurrency is actually quite difficult today to use as an everyday method of payment. If you were to go to an exchange with your bitcoin or your ether it would probably take you 3 to 7 days to get that money paid out into a normal bank account. What Crypterium will do is make that whole process seamless and give an opportunity for a consumer to actually use their cryptocurrency to pay for everyday items.”
The short-term mothed of the startup is to influence the experience of O’Brien in the traditional finance industry and his link in the credit card service sector to maintain a strategic partnership with Visa or MasterCard and introduce cryptocurrency-backed debit cards.
Even though several firms and projects like Xapo and Coins.ph have made use of Visa-partnered banks to introduce cryptocurrency debit cards, the firms were compelled to shut down their debit card services as a result of the ban on cryptocurrency debit cards by Visa in 2017.
Visa highlighted last year that it has shut down the debit card services of cryptocurrency startups as a result of the fact that the services were started without the approval of Visa through third party service providers. There is still a possibility that projects such as Crypterium could launch official cryptocurrency debit cards in the future if they can directly work with Visa or MasterCard.
“That card will be attached to a wallet that we’ve created and every time the consumer makes a transaction we will receive a request for that transaction in our systems, we will check the bitcoin or ether account and provided that they’ve got sufficient balance we will execute a trade and mark their bitcoin balance for a trade and approve the transaction. You can be in a store and all of that’s done in a fraction of a second,” said O’Brien.
