Visa, the world's largest credit card company, is widely regarded as being hostile to Bitcoin. It would seem intuitive that a traditional financial provider should look unkindly on anything that threatens its hegemony. Publicly, though, the company has had very little to say about Bitcoin, preferring to focus on matters within its own domain. In a CNBC interview on Wednesday, the corporation's CEO broke his silence, opining – predictably – that Bitcoin is not a payments system.

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Legacy Finance Meets Future Money

Alfred Kelly

In an interview on Wednesday, recorded at New York's National Retail Federation conference the previous day, Kelly was pressed for his thoughts on Bitcoin. "I don't view it as payment system player," said the CEO. "We at Visa won't process transactions that are cryptocurrency-based. We will only process fiat currency-based transactions."

This tallies with the actions of Visa subsidiary Wavecrest, which cut off debit card services to dozens of European crypto card companies less than a fortnight ago. At the time, Visa denied that it was striking back at the threat posed by cryptocurrencies. The company was adamant that it was irregularities on behalf of Wavecrest clients that triggered the ban.

As news.Bitcoin.com noted at the time:

Given that it processes more than 100 billion transactions a year versus bitcoin's circa 130 million, it's premature to assert that Visa is feeling threatened by cryptocurrency. Whatever bitcoin is, be it a store of value or a medium of exchange, it is not, as yet, a Visa killer.