Bitcoin has been touted as a potentially disruptive technology in the financial sector, possibly replacing other forms of payment. This raised the question whether bitcoin might soon overtake credit cards of these can co-exist.
According to CardLinx CEO Silvio Tavares in last week’s Keynote 2015 conference, bitcoin and credit cards don’t necessarily have to outlast each other. He shared how CardLinx puts focus on developing standards for promoting card-linking, a process by which the consumer data managed by payment companies is shared with merchants to target discounts and rewards.
Credit Cards Linked to Bitcoin?
CardLinx was founded in 2013 with founding members including Bank of America, Facebook and Microsoft. As stated on its webpage, “The CardLinx Association includes some of the largest banks, merchants, digital publishers, payment networks, merchant acquirers, payment processors and offer technology companies in the world. Our members serve or represent over 6 million merchants, have issued over 1.9 billion payment cards, and serve consumers with over 200 million card enabled accounts and over 700 million active daily users.”
However, some members of the bitcoin community present in the conference treated this with a bit of skepticism. After all, credit card transactions carry higher costs compared to bitcoin payments which have low to zero fees.
Tavares went on to say that the payments sector continues to innovate, even exploring emerging technologies to see how the current processes can be improved. Credit card processing company Visa has reportedly tasked its innovations lab in India to conduct cryptocurrency research that can be applicable to its existing products Visa Checkout and mVisa.
“If you think about payments and digital advertising, there’s enormous innovation transforming how people find and pay for services and the business model for how traditional payments work,” said Tavares in an interview with CoinDesk. “There’s a huge amount of innovation in the space and that’s both a challenge and opportunity for bitcoin.”
