From left: Cuy Sheffield, VP, head of crypto, Visa; Chris Maurice, CEO and co-founder, Yellow Card; Godfrey Sullivan, senior VP, head of product and solution, CEMEA, Visa.
Licensed stablecoin payments orchestrator Yellow Card has partnered with global digital payments firm Visa to help drive the next phase of innovation in cross-border payments and financial infrastructure across emerging markets.
In a statement, the companies said they will collaborate to explore stablecoin use cases and opportunities “to help streamline treasury operations, enhance liquidity management and enable faster, more cost-effective money movement across borders”.
Kamogelo Mosime, SA country manager at Yellow Card, said emerging markets are entering a phase where cross-border payments must evolve from simply being faster and cheaper to becoming reliable, programmable and regulated.
“The future belongs to infrastructure that uses stablecoins as the plumbing but is built with compliance and interoperability front and centre. For Africa, the next leap is giving individuals and businesses a financial bridge between on-chain liquidity and off-chain usability, with infrastructure that abstracts the complexity and makes crypto-native rails feel familiar, secure and compliant.”
Stablecoins are designed to minimise the impact of price volatility by being linked to the price of a specific commodity like gold or silver.
Chris Maurice, co-founder and CEO of Yellow Card, said: “Traditional payment companies continue to question not ‘if’ they need a stablecoin strategy, but how quickly they can deploy one.”
According to Mosime, stablecoins in Africa are currently the workaround. “Businesses use them to settle invoices, move capital, hedge currency risk and pay contractors globally without the latency of traditional rails. This is financial inclusion on a much more holistic, sophisticated and innovative approach. But going forward, they won’t just be a workaround, they’ll be the core and preferred rails. From merchant settlement to treasury operations to yield-on-stable solutions, we’re going to see stablecoins quietly become the connective tissue of financial flows across borders. What Visa heavily brings to this equation is endpoint credibility, and that’s critical for mainstream adoption.”
Godfrey Sullivan, senior VP and head of product and solution for CEMEA at Visa, said: “We’re excited to team up with Yellow Card to enable faster and more accessible digital payments. We believe that every institution that moves money will need a stablecoin strategy. As more players in the payments ecosystem explore this powerful new technology, Visa stands ready to help our partners navigate the transformation, bringing the scale, trust and innovation needed to help build the next generation of global payments.”
Amid an increase in digital fraud and cyber security threats, Yellow Card asserts that in Africa, while digital adoption is high, safeguards are still catching up, which means customer protection is non-negotiable.
The company views the partnership with Visa as a credibility multiplier.
“It shows that the traditional and the crypto-native can not only co-exist, they can build together. Yellow Card brings the infrastructure and the reach; Visa brings the trust, the brand and the ability to interface with legacy rails at a global level. In a continent where crypto still battles perception, a partnership of this scale signals to banks, regulators and institutions that this ecosystem is legitimate. For customers, it unlocks a real use case, crypto liquidity into card-based spend, instantly,” Mosime added.
