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The outgoing chief executive officer of the credit card behemoth Visa, Alfred Kelly, believes that the company can integrate stablecoins and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) into its services to improve the future of payments.
In a call at Visa’s annual stockholder meeting earlier in the week, Kelly, who will officially step down as CEO on February 1, shared Visa’s plans regarding CBDCs and private stablecoins. Kelly said:
It’s very early days, but we continue to believe that stablecoins and central bank digital currencies have the potential to play a meaningful role in the payments space, and we have several initiatives underway.
Adding,
We’ve had an immaterial amount of investments in crypto funds and companies as we seek to invest in the payments ecosystem.
Ryan Mclnerney, the President of Visa, will officially replace Kelly as CEO on February 1, but Kelly will remain on board and serve as executive chairman, Cointelegraph reports. Mclnerney appears to be bullish on blockchain-powered payment solutions and said in an interview with Fortune that Visa still has “$14 trillion of cash out there being spent by customers that can be digitized.” He added that Visa continues to identify opportunities where best to use cryptocurrency payments.
Visa Involved in a Number of Crypto-Related Initiatives
During the stockholder meeting, Kelly assured that the firm’s balance sheet had not been affected by some of the massive failures that severely impacted the sector:
We’ve had no credit losses related to these failures [...] In everything we do, please know that we’re extremely focused on maintaining the integrity of Visa’s payment system and the payment system in totality and, of course, the reputation of our brand standing for trust.
Visa has not suffered much due to the failures in the crypto space in 2022, and as such, the firm is involved in several crypto-related projects. Most recently, Visa announced that it is collaborating with Ethereum to devise a solution to allow automated bills to be paid directly from an Ethereum-based wallet. The payments giant also announced that Blockchain.com would launch a pre-paid crypto-centric Visa card in which each card links to a verifiable Blockchain.com Wallet account.
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