Visa makes five strategic crypto hires and placements

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Payments giant Visa has expanded its in-house crypto team with five key hires and moves, according to Visas crypto chief Cuy Sheffield on Twitter.

This month, the company recruited two new team members. These include Catherine Carle, who will focus on the social impact of crypto and community partnerships. She joins the firm from the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota where she worked in healthcare innovation and entrepreneurship. Previously, she worked at Monitor Deloitte, a strategy consulting firm which was acquired by Deloitte in 2013.

Visa also added Chike Ukaegbu, founder of New York-based technology accelerator Startup52, which focuses on supporting companies with strong diversity profiles. He will be the crypto strategy team leader for emerging markets. Previously, Ukaegbu ran for president of Nigeria, where he led Africa’s lightest and first all-digital presidential campaign, according to his LinkedIn profile.

I am incredibly grateful to work with such an amazing team and have the opportunity to leverage the power of Visa to help advance the adoption and usefulness of Bitcoin, Stablecoins, NFTs, DeFi and public blockchain networks, Sheffield tweeted.

Talent transfer to the crypto team

The payments company has also recruited three employees from the rest of the company to take on key roles in its crypto team.

First, Anuj Bathla, a former senior director focused on product marketing and go-to-market (GTM), has become the global leader in crypto GTM. Bathla will work for AJ Shanley’s global crypto business development team, which connects to crypto exchanges and businesses to help them issue Visa cards. Based in California, he has been with the company for nine years.

Second, product manager Daniel Mottice will be leaving Visa Direct to take ownership of his crypto products. According to his LinkedIn, he will lead the expansion of Visa’s digital currency settlement capabilities. This will focus on the use of stable coins for cross-border payments.

Third, Alex Chiang, who joined Visa as an associate in its graduate development program four years ago, will be part of its product team. He will focus on growing the adoption of NFTs in e-commerce, according to Sheffield, as well as helping visa clients take advantage of decentralized funding protocols (DeFi).

Visa plans to expand its crypto team even further. Sheffield pointed out that the company has job postings for product management, business development and engineering roles.

Crypto visa plans

To date, Visa has given an overview of its plans for the cryptocurrency space. Such plans revolve around providing similar services for crypto to Visa’s for fiat payments, including allowing businesses and consumers to access and move crypto.

While the nature of cryptos allows consumers to be their own bank by holding their own assets and doing direct transactions, the relatively complex nature of this transaction provides the business with the ability to do this work instead.

Visa has sought to make it easy for consumers to exchange crypto for fiat through its line of crypto debit cards. The company claims to work with over 25 digital currency wallets, allowing their users to spend crypto (sort of) at its 61 million merchants around the world.

He’s also getting into the settlement game, having started experimenting with using the USDC Stable Coin (USDC) to accept payments from his partner Crypto.com, a crypto exchange and crypto debit card provider. According to Fortune, this is a major change on the infrastructure side for Visa, meaning that crypto wallet companies will no longer need to exchange their funds for fiat currency to send to the business.

Beyond that, Visa plans to expand support for more digital currencies in the future. But instead of supporting cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, ether, it will focus on the two types of fiat-related currencies namely stablecoins and central bank digital currencies.

2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All rights reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial or other advice.

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