MELBOURNE, Australia and COPENHAGEN, Denmark--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Global payment innovation leader Verrency, and Coinify, a leading virtual currency payment provider, have today announced a new partnership enabling banks to securely offer their customers the ability to use virtual currency for payments at any merchant around the world.
The partnership will empower banks utilising Verrency’s middleware platform to integrate virtual currency funding sources and digital wallets with their existing payments rails, without the need for customers to use specially issued prepaid or debit cards. Instead, banks can offer their customers the ability to make payments anywhere using virtual currency via their existing payments products, such as their physical cards and digital wallets.
The service works by using Verrency’s high-performance value-added payments technology layer to enable a bank to easily route payments to different funding sources authorised by the bank, such as a custodial or non-custodial wallet containing digital assets. Coinify supports the selection and connection of the wallet infrastructure, which may be either internal or external to the bank.
Verrency CEO David Link, who was also appointed as an advisor to Ripple in early 2016, said the partnership is a gamechanger for the beginning of increased utility of token-based assets among major financial institutions.
“The rapid growth in consumer interest and ownership of virtual currency assets and the rise of virtual trust technologies has been a key trend for the payments sector as a whole over the last decade,” Mr Link said. “As virtual currencies transition in the next few years from being speculative investments into a smaller number of mainstream assets – which will see more government or fiat-backed stable tokens, or even tokens simply as a payment element - it is critical that banks have the technology in place to actually allow the usage of such virtual assets across their existing consumer-centered legacy payments rails. Mainstream usage of tokens or virtual assets will not occur by connecting the merchant-side of the equation – it simply will take too long to achieve ubiquity, without which there will be no significant usage.”
“By partnering with Coinify, Verrency is now able to enable banks to offer their customers virtual currency and token usage via their existing debit and credit cards without engaging in a costly infrastructure overhaul.”
“Coinify is honoured to partner with Verrency and connect our two platforms, which holds a huge potential for crypto adoption” said Mark Højgaard, co-founder and CEO of Coinify. “Verrency’s platform that can easily integrate third parties with the existing banking payments infrastructure is a potential breakthrough for the future space of digital currency and mainstream token usage, where established technology titans, such as Facebook’s Libra project, are beginning to explore the possibilities.”
Verrency’s platform is a high-performance bank-grade technology layer and API platform that fits on top of a processor’s, bank’s or digital wallet’s existing infrastructure, enabling them to rapidly deliver enhanced services and products around the moment of payment without changing their existing technology.
The partnership sees Coinify join Verrency’s V+ partner ecosystem, which facilitates collaboration with Fintechs and enables a nearly endless set of hyper-personalizable services including redemption of rewards, facilitation of disbursements, rounding up of payments to savings or charitable destinations, access to installment credit at point of sale, facilitation of ‘real-time’ sandbox environments, and many more.
This announcement comes as Facebook’s proposed virtual currency, Libra, has reinvigorated discussion around the potential for virtual currencies and fiat-backed tokens to become a more mainstream part of global payments infrastructure.
About Verrency
Verrency empowers banks and other financial institutions to quickly, cost-effectively and reliably deliver innovative new products and services to consumers and business partners around their most important interaction – the moment of payment. Verrency’s high-performance bank-grade technology layer works behind the scenes to enable a nearly endless range of value-added services for a bank's customers quickly and easily without major changes to existing payments infrastructure or the need to integrate to point-of-sale systems. Verrency also enables rapid connection to third-party services via its FinTech ecosystem with little to no integration. For more information, see www.verrency.com.