Railsbank partners with Wirex as new card provider in APAC

By Edil Corneille

Wirex has announced a partnership with Railsbank that will see the London-based FinTech provide Wirex cards in the APAC region. Wirex stated that the move represents a rapid migration of existing and new customers away from Wirecard, who previously acted as Wirex’s card provider in the APAC region.

Railsbank is a global open banking platform that will be responsible for the card-issuing service for Wirex’s customer base in the APAC region. Existing APAC customers will have their cards automatically migrated to Railsbank, which means they can continue using Wirex’s services as normal.

Using the payments infrastructure, Wirex is encouraging the mainstream adoption of cryptocurrency. As a company offering a crypto-enabled pre-paid/ debit card, Wirex gives users the ability to spend up to 20 fiat and cryptocurrencies at more than 54 million locations worldwide. For every in-store purchase made, the company automatically rewards customers with up to 1.5 percent back in bitcoin, as part of the Cryptoback rewards programme.

Wirex has mentioned that it has experienced considerable growth in the past 18 months, reaching 3 million users, launching in APAC, and achieving its highest volume of transactions on a single day in APAC in May this year. The company has since focused on providing additional functionality in the APAC region, with aims to expand into new territories. Working with Railsbank as its new card issuer is expected to facilitate this growth.

Wirex works with multiple regulated and trusted card issuers in different regions. Pavel Matveev, CEO and co-founder, Wirex elucidated on the partnership with Railsbank and said, “Wirex’s new partnership with Railsbank reinforces our core goal of protecting existing customers’ funds, whilst continuing to innovate in a legal and compliant manner. Working alongside them allows us to continue empowering our customers to buy, hold, exchange and spend multiple traditional and cryptocurrencies whilst minimising the risk to their funds.”

Louisa Murray, Head of Sales at Railsbank enthused, “We are very happy to help with migration and especially pleased that it took less than 45 days to complete. It’s interesting that many companies are now coming to us with the same request, to migrate them onto the Railsbank technology platform. We look forward to working closely with Wirex over the coming months.”

There will be no service interruption for users during the migration process, and Wirex customers in APAC will have no issues accessing their account, transferring funds, or using the app. The customer’s account and card details will remain the same, and users will not need to transfer their funds over.