“Plastic cards will disappear when everybody has a smartphone”

From Crypterium live services to future use cases, to personal reasons for moving to crypto — catch up what Crypterium CEO Marc O’Brien had to say in his recent interview with Breaking Banks, #1 fintech podcast in the world.

If you have missed it, listen to the full recording here, or take a look at the highlights.

A recap on Crypterium services

We already have live services and we’ve got many more use cases coming out. Our customers can register with our service, go for a very short KYC process and be able to do mobile top-ups. For anywhere in the world, whether it’s a developing economy like Kenya or any other country you’ll be able to use the Crypterium app and refill your mobile. This is a part of our strategy for being fully global.

The other service, that is also strategic for us in terms of volume, is to enable all of our customers with crypto, to let them send crypto to their contacts in just one second. Basically, in the Bitcoin folder that you have, you can select your contact, select the amount and send crypto to them. They will get the crypto in the Crypterium account themselves directly, they’ll get an SMS message if they don’t have an account yet.

There are different numbers, but the numbers I’ve looked into is that there are 25 mln crypto unique crypto wallets today. It doesn’t compare at all to the 3 bln of Visa and MC card holders. What we offer is a very good use case for inviting your friends and people you know to crypto so they could experiment with it in a very easy-to-use way.

In addition to that, we are going to attach your card, and we are working with Visa’s, Master Card’s and Union Pay’s to bring our customers the opportunity to make E-commerce payments. If customers want a plastic card they can have a plastic card too.

The three pillars

We are talking about our business in three segments. The first one is we have a Hot wallet for all the major cryptocurrencies, but we’re looking to add many more over time. Currently, we’ve got BTC, ETH and Litecoin. Secondly, we have liquidity and effects platform which means we’re able to make instant payments into the fiat world so we then have a bridge into the fiat world. All of the merchants who want to accept fiat for transfers will get fiat.

The last part is our own token. We have essentially tokenized the service so when a customer wants to make a transaction, they need our token CRPT token as “gas” for the transaction and that’s exactly where our utility tokens get utilized.

Going global

We have 450 000 registered interested people around the world that really want the service. We have 72 000 token holders, in terms of active users we went live four weeks ago and we made no promotion and no marketing as we yet are getting ready to really scale our product.

Digital waves

I’ve worked with VISA and MC for many years and they have amazing business models. They’ve really succeeded in the major developing economies but they still have the huge opportunity in the developing markets. There is such a great opportunity for them to displace cash and actually, the displacement of cash on the cards means that payments go digital. And the opportunity for us at Crypterium is to ride that wave that has gone digital, bridge this crypto-fiat gap and start to migrate customers across.

My reason for changing from VISA into the fin-tech community 4 years ago is that I wanted to be at the leading edge of digital, leverage my payments experience and in the last year join the crypto space because I see it’s going mainstream.

The end of plastic

Plastic cards will disappear when everybody has a smartphone, I’d give it 20 years.

About Crypterium

CCrypterium is building a mobile app that will turn cryptocurrencies into money that you can spend with the same ease as cash. Shop around the world and pay with your coins and tokens at any NFC terminal, or via scanning the QR codes. Make purchases in online stores, pay your bills, or just send money across borders in seconds, reliably and for a fraction of a penny.

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