Two months ago, BVNK CEO Jesse Hemson-Struthers proclaimed a “great start” to the year based on a new tie to Visa, the largest U.S. card network.
He posted an excited message on his stablecoin company’s website about working with the “world's most trusted payments network” to enable “faster, more flexible payments,” via Visa Direct’s cross-border rails.
It was perhaps a natural follow-on to Hemson-Struthers saying last May that he was “thrilled to announce” that Visa’s venture arm had made a “strategic investment” in BVNK. Both Visa announcements were big wins for the five-year-old, London-based stablecoin infrastructure company.
Visa seemed excited too, with the global head of the card network’s product, commercial & money movement solutions, Mark Nelsen, explaining a shared vision for the future. “We’re partnering with [BVNK] to provide the reliable, trusted infrastructure needed to expand our Visa Direct stablecoin pilots,” Nelsen said in a post.
How quickly things can change in the fast-paced world of digital payments, and stablecoins.
Fast-forward to March, and BVNK has fallen into the arms of Visa rival Mastercard, which said two weeks ago that it plans to pay about $1.8 billion to buy BVNK.
Like Visa before it, Mastercard was eager to proclaim how the stablecoin connection will power its evolving approach to payments. “Adding on-chain rails to our network will support speed and programmability for virtually every type of transaction,” Mastercard’s chief product officer, Jorn Lambert, said in a statement.
When a Mastercard spokesperson was asked what will happen to BVNK’s tie to Visa, he said that was a question for BVNK or Visa, given the transaction isn’t expected to close until later this year.
Spokespeople for Visa and BVNK didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Convera CEO Patrick Gauthier, a payments industry veteran and former Visa executive, suspects he knows the answer: Visa will be gone. That’s the most likely scenario, he said during an interview about the payments landscape.
That said, Gauthier contended that the outcome isn’t uncommon for such hook-ups, emphasizing that a player like Visa wouldn’t be committed to just one provider. He noted Visa’s work also with stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge Network, which was purchased last year by digital payments upstart Stripe for $1.1 billion.
“I see this move more as Mastercard reacting to Visa than Visa needing to react to Mastercard,” said Gauthier, whose commercial, cross-border payments business was spun off from Western Union.
Visa wasn’t the only investor in BVNK. There were several other high-profile venture capitalists as well as a top crypto company – namely, Haun Ventures, Tiger Global and Coinbase Ventures – that put money into the stablecoin startup.
In an interview on CNBC after the Mastercard announcement, Haun Ventures founder Katie Haun explained how the stablecoin sphere has become an “arms race in the global payments space.”
As such, it seems unlikely that Visa didn’t have a shot at buying BVNK. The venture investors were probably savvy enough to help BVNK play the card networks, and maybe others, off each other in floating the company for sale, and potentially driving up the price.
In any case, now Hemson-Struthers is all about Mastercard. “Today marks the most ambitious phase of our journey yet,” he said in a March 17 post regarding BVNK’s Mastercard agreement.
