Crypterium, a cryptocurrency bank, has hired the former UK head of Visa to be its new CEO.
The Estonia-based company, slogan "The JP Morgan of Cryptobanks", was launched with an initial coin offering in October 2017 through which it raised $52 million. Its token is called CRPT, and it has a current market capitalisation of $73 million.
Mark O'Brien worked at VISA for 15 years and headed the giant firm's UK and Ireland branch for almost six. He joins a team of 13 people who are mostly, like him, executives poached from traditional finance and fintech careers.
O'Brien told Business Insider: "The idea is that cryptocurrency is actually quite difficult today to use as an everyday method of payment. If you were to go to an Exchange with your Bitcoin or your ether it would probably take you 3 to 7 days to get that money paid out into a normal bank account.
What Crypterium will do is make that whole process seamless and give an opportunity for a consumer to actually use their cryptocurrency to pay for everyday items."
According to Business Insider, O'Brien intends to partner with one of the major credit card companies to release a cryptocurrency-based payment card. O'Brien said that a customer's card will be attached to his wallet, and transactions will be verified and processed "in a fraction of a second." However, he declined to share the technical details of this process, telling Business Insider that it is "carefully protected" intellectual property.
The firm also intends to expand under his leadership and is currently looking at offices in New York, Singapore, and Miami.
Last week we reported on a head executive of a major Australian bank leaving his post after less than a year to join a cryptocurrency-based company. Not long before, some senior employees left one of the biggest investment funds in the world to set up their own cryptocurrency-based one.
