“If the global market moves towards accepting consensus currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, in the future, Visa will consider the support for cryptocurrency”, Alfred Kelly, the CEO of Visa, points out.

Kelly believes that in the short and medium term, cryptocurrency will not pose any threat to the reserve currencies that form the basis of the Visa products. However, as digital currencies spread, the company is planning to meet the demand for this type of asset.

“We wish to be at the center of all the payment flows in the world, regardless of how they occur and what currency is at the basis of the process. Therefore, if we need to go there, we will go. However, right now, cryptocurrency is more a product than a means of payment.”

The company Visa is the most influential payment system of the financial sector and is one of the most profitable businesses along with Mastercard.

Kelly claims that in the long run, the cryptocurrency users will be able to send and receive digital assets through the Visa platforms, paying commissions to the company, i.e. Visa will act as an intermediary.

However, by the time the company Visa considers it necessary to integrate cryptocurrencies, intermediaries may no longer be needed for processing payments to digital currencies. By introducing the non-custodial wallets and the platform of the open source code, the cryptocurrency users have got a chance to efficiently and securely transfer digital assets without paying additional fees.

Now, while cryptocurrencies are not used by trading companies, it is quite difficult to make a digital currency payment for simple products like coffee. A Visa-level financial institution would be able alone to significantly increase the percentage of use of cryptocurrencies by sellers. However, the company Visa is planning to enter the cryptocurrency sector as an intermediary only after a few years, when cryptocurrencies will already be massively used as an alternative to fiat money.

The support and experiment with cryptocurrency is needed just now – at the time when it is experiencing exponential growth and is still at an early stage of development. It is quite obvious that in a few years the cryptocurrency sector will rely mainly on decentralized systems and services. The companies such as Fidelity, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup have already started serving the customers of the cryptocurrency market, seeing a significant demand for a new kind of assets. However, Visa, Morgan Stanley and some other financial institutions still prefer to wait.