Travel Giant Adopts Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) in New Challenge to Crypto Skeptics
In a recent Bloomberg interview, BitPay chief commercial officer Sonny Singh addresses skepticism towards Bitcoin and its ability to entice major companies to use it on a day-to-day basis to make payments.
Singh, who helps lead the world’s largest Bitcoin payment processing platform, allowing merchants and businesses to convert Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash into fiat, asserts Bitcoin’s power as not just a store of value but as a payment method. He says that most of those use cases are happening outside of the United States.
“I think Bitcoin has a lot of regional use cases around the world, especially outside of America…
At BitPay we just signed up a Fortune 500 company called Avnet, which is one of the largest IT providers in the world. They use us for B2B payment so people in Asia can make multi-million dollar payments buying hardware equipment using Bitcoin because it’s cheaper, quicker than a bank wire, or credit cards are impossible. So you’re starting to see that use case really develop around the world that’s outside of America – where in America, most people just use it for speculation. But outside in the world, Bitcoin is really catching on fast.”
BitPay has partnered with Corporate Traveller, a division of Flight Centre Travel Group, one of the world’s largest travel companies, to accept cryptocurrency payments.
Corporate Traveller is the largest and only UK travel management company that delivers online and offline services purely for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises. The new partnership allows customers to make their business travel bookings by paying in Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. Transactions will settle in GBP within two business days, without risk or exposure to the volatility of the crypto market.
According to Andy Hegley, UK general manager of Corporate Traveller,
“We identified an increasing demand from our clients for the option to pay in Bitcoin for business travel bookings made by our travel consultants.”
Those clients have SME-sized travel spends that range from $65,000 to $2.6 million, with Corporate Traveller servicing customers in the USA, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and India.
Speaking at DC Blockchain Summit 2019, Stephen Pair, co-founder and CEO of BitPay, says most digital assets will ultimately be issued on a blockchain, and most payments will be conducted on a blockchain with databases integrating the technology. He says use cases for Bitcoin in the payments sector are growing steadily.
“We see a lot of traction in international supply chain type of payments where there’s a company in one country that needs to pay a vendor in another country.”
“Those payments are anywhere from the few tens of thousands on up to the hundreds of thousands of dollars in value.”
Despite Bitcoin’s widespread use as a speculative asset with a significant focus on the introduction of hybridized financial instruments, from crypto derivatives to Bitcoin exchange-traded funds and notes, Pair says the world’s leading cryptocurrency is a safe and secure payment rail for merchants, and that this fundamental use case, which is at the core of Bitcoin’s inception, has not gotten eclipsed or lost due to the trading frenzy.
“I wouldn’t agree that we’ve seen any kind of drop off on the merchant side of it. We’re processing more merchant payments today than we’ve ever processed. About 40% of our volume is more the B2B use case, and the remainder of that, probably 30 to 40%, is really a merchant style payment.
That could be an online e-commerce payment – it’s predominantly online and e-commerce type payments. We do have tools for in-person payments. That’s more of a strategic initiative for us to make sure we’re on all the platforms, and we can handle the in-person payments.”
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