Why Does BCard Allow Only ACH Loads?

Crypto, Plaid, and Zelle can only be enabled when we have enough transaction volume.

It might be surprising to see that a web3 product like BCard only allows ACH (automated clearing house) loading of funds. While we'd like to support loading your card balance via crypto, our card-issuing partners won't allow this just yet, mainly due to the risk associated with the blockchain industry. Plaid and Zelle require large transaction volumes before BCard can support these services.

What Risk Does Blockchain Pose to a Card Issuer?

The US financial system is built of layers of financial service companies (including banks) which accumulate and send capital (money) to each other, charging fees to make profit.

Our card issuer (Transcard) has a relationship with a bank (SouthState Bank) who has a relationship with a card network (Mastercard). Each of these relationships may be supported by other financial service companies which provide things like technology (ex. Plaid, Zelle), payment (ex. Stripe), settlement (ex. Dwolla). There are hundreds thousands of financial service companies in the US alone.

Given that each of these financial service companies are transacting tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on a daily basis with each other, trust (aka the relationship) between the companies is extremely important. Any breach of trust could be the end for one of these companies.

In the case of the blockchain industry, the regulatory environment and collapse of firms like FTX in 2021 created a situation where most banks won't work with any companies who are associated with blockchain. In other words, working with a blockchain company could be enough for a bank to drop our card issuer as a client. This would end their business, so it's something they take very seriously.

The Key: Transaction Volume

Since financial services companies make their money via transactions, the key success metric for them is transaction volume (ie the amount of money flowing through their systems). This means that if BCard can produce enough transaction volume, we can convince more financial services companies to work with us.

How much is enough? There's no hard and fast rule, but a good milestone is $10M USD monthly. We believe if BCard can get 10,000 people to spend $1000/month using our cards, we can enable crypto, Plaid, and Zelle loads.

Taking the Long Road to Guard our Ethos

You may have noticed that cards issued by the likes of crypto.com and Coinbase don't have this issue. These companies are privately owned and have raised hundreds of millions in venture capital, which means they can spend hundreds of thousands a month to shortcut their relationships with other financial service companies. It also means they must put the needs of their investors above the needs of their users.

BCard, on the other hand, is funded and owned entirely by the web3 community. Since we don't have investors, it means that we can put the needs of our users first. It also means that we can't shortcut the relationship step - we need to build our relationships and transaction volume slowly and steadily.

BCard's goal is to have all of the features you expect in a web3 payment card. By taking the long road, we hope we can build an organization you actually want to be part of, rather than just another bank.