By
Temitope Olatunji
April 17th, 2024
Line Pay has partnered with VISA to bring new blockchain solutions, contactless payments, and a pre-paid digital visa card. Line says that with this new partnership, they will be able to reach 187 million people around the world.
This recently announced partnership will open the gates of 54 million VISA merchants for Line Pay users. That way Line hopes to expand their services in the world. Currently, Line claims that they have 80 million users only in Japan. Additionally, this new feature will allow users to apply for a virtual VISA card, which they will be able to use even if the merchant doesn’t use Line Pay.
Moreover, the two companies will work on a new blockchain-powered fintech solution for business-to-business and cross-border payments.
“With Visa’s global network and infrastructure, LINE Pay users will be able to enjoy the advantages of that innovative, worldwide network,” said Youngsu Ko, the CEO of LINE Pay
Visa and Its Visa Next Platform
Recently CoinSpeaker reported that Visa introduced their new Visa Next platform. The platform is enhanced with complete beta application programming interfaces (APIs) that are intended to provide issuers and issuer processors with a possibility to create and test new products. Visa then announced that these new APIs will be used by the participants of the Visa ecosystem to issue digital cards on demand and add digital services.
Could this new partnership with LINE be related to the new Visa Next platform?
Line Set Out to Compete with Apple Pay and Google Pay
At the moment, Line Pay also has an option to add a VISA card, but in order to use this service, customers need to visit places where the merchant accepts Line Pay as well. As you can understand, this made it useless for Line customers to use this service outside of Japan.
However, with this new partnership, Line Pay hopes to expand to a much wider audience. And VISA can provide this audience. In addition to this, Line Pay enters quite a competitive market which is currently owned by Google Pay and Apple Pay. Nevertheless, Line is popular among Japanese people, and this new feature will allow all the Japanese people to make payments with Line Pay anywhere in the world where VISA is accepted.
Line Also Has its Own Cryptocurrency
Line issued its own cryptocurrency called LINK during the end of summer 2018, September. When it was released, it immediately got listed on its digital asset exchange BitBox which they also launched in the summer of 2018, June. An interesting aspect was that they chose not to conduct an ICO, but utilized an airdrop instead. This was done in order to give Line users LINK cryptocurrency as a compensation for utilizing products within the Line ecosystem.
Since Line and Line Pay is so tied with cryptocurrencies and now their new partnership includes the development of new digital payments and blockchain solutions systems, we can only guess what will happen with the cryptocurrency aspect of Line Corporation, since one of their main goals is to include alternative currency cross-border transactions along with blockchain solutions.