Visa CEO: Crypto Doesn’t Challenge Our Hegemony in the Short to Medium-Term
CEO of global payment giant Visa Al Kelly stated that cryptocurrency does not pose a challenge to the company’s dominance in the payment sphere in the “short to medium-term,” in an interview on CNBC's Mad Money Oct. 25. When asked if “crypto [is] a real challenge to Visa’s hegemony in this business,” Kelly told Mad Money host Jim Cramer that it was “certainly not in the short to medium-term in any way.” According to Kelly, crypto needs to “move from being a commodity to really being a payment instrument” before it can become a real competitor to the conventional financial system. Kelly added that the crypto market “needs to be a market” that can become “somewhat like a fiat currency” in order for Visa “to be comfortable” interacting with the asset.
Following the statement, Kelly claimed that if crypto “goes in [the] direction [of fiat]” Visa will also “move in that direction,” stating that the company wants to be in “the middle of every payment flow in the world,” and concluding: “So if we have to go there, we will go there. But right now it [crypto] is more of a commodity than a payment vehicle.”
