Visa CEO, Alfred F Kelly Jr, has said that he doesn’t believe the world needs faster payments, according to a report by Bloomberg. The CEO said that the world’s financial institutions have invested in systems that allow for near instantaneous transfers, which could affect debit card business for Visa, but he doesn’t seem to be worried.
Visa's CEO isn't buying into the hype around faster #payments even though some of its biggest banking partners continue to push the technology here in the U.S. https://t.co/q08A5V6fQI
— Jenny Surane (@jennysurane) May 29, 2019
In a conference call held on Wednesday, Kelly said,
I’m not convinced that these are going to take off like crazy. Does the consumer really need the funds that much faster?
He also pointed to the flaws in systems being adopted by others, saying that there are going to be challenges,
Some of these systems are not as reliable, not as robust and very unfortunately don’t have the same protections. If I now have a dispute with you over it and there needs to be some element of charge-back, how’s that going to work? With great difficulty.
It is well known that Visa stands to lose a lot from distributed payment systems that are being developed in the crypto space, which the CEO does not make mention in the call. Kelly has previously said that he believes cryptocurrencies are a commodity and not a payments vehicle.
At the same time, several cryptocurrency projects are working on real-time payment systems that already perform transactions at a much faster rate and for much lower costs than Visa. Ripple (XRP), Stellar Lumens (XLM), and Nano (NANO) all offer transaction speeds that greatly outpace that of traditional payment networks. With these developments in the crypto space taking place rapidly, Visa might have to adopt new solutions to keep up with emerging solutions.
However, Visa is planning to open a crypto division up.
