On Monday, the world’s second-largest payments company, Mastercard, unveiled a new initiative in partnership with Paxos that would assist banks and other financial institutions start offering cryptocurrency trading, according to a latest CNBC report.
Mastercard has initiated a program known as Crypto Source, which will assist financial institutions in adhering to crypto compliance laws, verifying transactions, and providing anti-money laundering and identification surveillance systems.
Mastercard will also oversee the security and regulatory compliance, two significant factors that many institutions have cited as major reasons for avoiding bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
According to the company, there are a lot of customers out there who are really interested in this and intrigued by crypto, but they would feel a lot more confident if those services were offered by their financial institutions. The company also mentions that some people still find it a little bit scary.
The product will go through a trial phase during the first three months of the next year, after which Mastercard will turn the handle to grow into further regions. The payments giant does not provide any information on the participating banks at this time.
Even though the cryptocurrency sector is now experiencing a “crypto winter,” the firm has said that more activity in the future may result in an increase in the number of transactions that power Mastercard’s core business.
In their words:
“It’s hard to believe that the crypto industry will truly go mainstream without embracing the financial industry as we know it.”
They went on to say that it would be naive to believe that a brief period of cryptowinter would signal the end of the phenomenon since they do not see that happening.
“As regulation comes in, there is going to be a higher degree of security available to the crypto platforms and we’ll see a lot of the current issues getting resolved in the quarters in the years to come.”
