Payment service giants and card providers Visa has advertised an opening for talent in the cryptocurrency and blockchain to help it navigate cryptocurrency opportunities. Visa listed the role under the title “Technical Product Manager, Visa Fintech” on job listing platform SmartRecruiters earlier in March.
Visa in the post described three attributes of its would-be manager for cryptocurrency-related products viz.:
Candidates that are “passionate about the intersection of payments and cryptocurrency.”
Candidates that are “deeply familiar with permissionless blockchain technology and have a close network of experts in the fast moving cryptocurrency and fintech ecosystem,” and
Candidates that are “excited about the challenge of developing new products for Visa to deliver value to fintechs looking to support cryptocurrencies”
“As a product manager on the Visa Crypto team,” Visa wrote, “this person will have responsibility for executing Visa’s product strategy within the cryptocurrency ecosystem.”
The role comes with responsibilities such as managing product roadmap, collaborating with key stakeholders across the strategy, risk, research, and engineering organizations. The individual who will work from Visa’s Palo Alto office will collaborate with the Visa Research team and report to the head of Crypto within the company’s broader Fintech Product group.
The role which is yet to be filled will further increase the cryptocurrency unit of its Fintech product division and underline Visa’s interest in following developments in the cryptocurrency space.
Last December, Visa reportedly grossly overpaid to acquire Earthport, a UK-based payment service provider which implements distributed ledger technology (DLT) for its API and has Ripple as its partner. The deal was in fulfillment of its goal to improve cross-border payment services business. The payment giants could integrate Ripple’s protocol to its existing payment network to boost cross-border transactions.
Cryptocurrency is having an impact on Fintech and how cross-border financial transactions are been carried out. It has, however, not reached to the point where it can usurp fiat currencies or conventional payment solutions provided by the likes of Visa and SWIFT.
As Smartereum reported, MoffettNathanson Analyst, Lisa Ellis warned that the development of cryptocurrencies poses a challenge to the existence of payment solution providers like Visa, PayPal, and MasterCard. Although the traditional financial sector widely believes this is impossible because blockchains were not created to scale massively, Ellis tasked the firms to keep tabs with development in the space.
However, last October, Visa’s CEO Al Kelly assured that cryptocurrencies do not pose a challenge to the company’s dominance in the payment sphere in the short- to medium-term. He argued that cryptocurrencies were more like commodities than they are instruments for payment.
CFO of Visa, Vasant Prabhu, is even more critical of cryptocurrencies and went on to call bitcoin a bubble which is about to burst. Last year, he condemned cryptocurrencies as the avenue for carrying out illegal activities like money laundering.
Riccardo Lopp is a writer specializing in Crypto, ethereum and whole blockchain ecosystem. His background is in economics and statistics.
