Visa has launched a new consulting practice to support financial institutions, retailers, and other organizations with cryptocurrency initiatives.
The new practice is situated within the payment processing company’s consulting and analytics division, which has approximately 700 payments consultants, data scientists, and economists globally.
Visa will now work with clients to help them advance their crypto journey – with offerings across strategy, capabilities assessment, business cases, and go-to-market approach. Visa says its consultants will draw on the company’s work with more than 60 crypto platforms to advise on areas such as product development, innovation and design, and marketing strategy and execution.
Visa views digital currencies as a new opportunity for growth beyond its core business in card payments. The firm has in recent months been pressured by Amazon, which said it will stop accepting Visa for payments in the UK, Australia, and Singapore – citing high fees.
Cryptocurrencies – Bitcoin foremost among them – are viewed by many leading economists, investors, and central bank officials as basically a valueless asset, a bubble, a Ponzi scheme, and a way to make criminal transactions easier. Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz in 2017 told Bloomberg News that “Bitcoin is successful only because of its potential for circumvention…it seems to me it ought to be outlawed.” He added, “It doesn’t serve any socially useful function.”
Bitcoin…
