by Rushali 
On Wednesday, Visa has announced that they are planning a suite of application programming interfaces (APIs) that will allow banks to offer bitcoin services.
In a press statement, the payment giant has said, the Visa Crypto APIs pilot program will let clients “easily connect into the infrastructure provided by Visa’s partner, Anchorage, a federally chartered digital asset bank, to allow their customers to buy and sell digital assets such as bitcoin as an investment within their existing consumer experiences.”
Visa crypto lead Cuy Sheffield has said in an interview that, Visa envisions a product set that extends to other cryptocurrencies and stable coins as well as other crypto services such as trading. Digital bank First Boulevard is the first bank involved in the pilot; Visa has issued a waitlist for other banks.
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This is the first time that Visa has offered crypto services to banks, previously they have been helping crypto companies to issue bank cards and partnered with 35 companies.
Last week, Visa CEO Al Kelly said during an earnings call that stable coins could be used for “global commerce,” adding that “to the extent, a specific digital currency becomes a recognized means of exchange, there’s no reason why we cannot add it to our network.”
Sheffield has said, “This is shifting to the next phase of Visa’s strategy where we’re looking at how Visa can also be a bridge between the thousands of financial institutions … and help them tap into the growing world of crypto assets and blockchain networks. We’re excited to see what early tests and consumer engagement look like for things like dollar-cost averaging to buy bitcoin or for things like earning bitcoin back as rewards.”
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Visa also announced that it would be partnering with five Black banks and fintech to offer financial and business services that cater to the Black community. First Boulevard, the first firm to join the Visa pilot, is a digital bank that is building tools to help African Americans passively build wealth and will launch sometime in early 2021. The bank plans on using the bitcoin services and its partnership with Visa to educate its customers about bitcoin as a way to close the general wealth disparities faced by Black communities, said Donald Hawkins, president, and CEO of First Boulevard.
In the future, the customers will go to banks to know about investing in crypto rather than searching on Youtube, Hawkins hopes.
Currently, First Boulevard offers customers 15% cashback for spending at Black-owned businesses. In the future, Hawkins plans to allow bank customers to put those rewards into crypto investments or high-yield crypto savings accounts.
First Boulevard plans to partner with Visa on financial education in addition to using the crypto services plugins.
Sheffield said, “Crypto is a gateway to financial literacy. It’s much easier to get people excited about money and important concepts around investing by just explaining what bitcoin is.”
The bank also plans to offer resources for investing in real estate as well as micro-investing.
“Our target market is Black Gen Z and Millennial women,” Hawkins said. “The majority of our team is made up of exactly our target market. … So cryptocurrency has been a hot topic in our company since the very beginning.”
