Visa CEO Talks About the Future of CBDCs and Stablecoins

Visa, a global American financial services business with headquarters in San Francisco, is convinced that it can incorporate blockchain-powered solutions into its services and offerings to support the coming wave of payments despite the prevailing crypto winter.

On January 24, during a call at Visa’s annual stockholder meeting, Al Kelly, the CEO of the credit card giant who will step down on February 1st, outlined briefly the company’s strategies for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and private stablecoins.

According to a San Francisco Business Times article published on January 24, Kelly stated:

“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 a number of initiatives underway.”

Kelly also affirmed that a number of the “high-profile failures” that shook the cryptocurrency industry in 2022 had no effect on Visa’s balance sheet. Notably, after the FTX filed for bankruptcy, the biggest payment processor in the world, Visa Inc., announced that it was ending its global credit card agreements with the cryptocurrency exchange. 

“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,” the outgoing CEO asserts.

Visa Suggests Account Abstraction

Meanwhile, Visa suggested a method called “account abstraction” in a post on cryptocurrency thought leadership in December. This approach uses smart contracts to make it possible for Ethereum to support automatic programmable payments.

Due to a smart contract that exists between the user’s account and the contract account, a user can utilize this to set up a self-custodial wallet that could execute automated, regular transfers without having to take any action on their part.