Visa’s collapse and the future of fintech

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​If you are up to date with what is happening in the financial market, or just in the world news, you must have seen that one of the largest credit card operators in the world, VISA, was offline on Friday for approximately 5 hours. Procedures have now returned to normal, but what does this outage mean in the context of the global financial market?


Credit cards have been growing steadily since their creation in the mid-1950s in the US, a period in which VISA was also created. Recent research indicates that in Europe 80% of consumers make purchases using credit cards, and a new wave is beginning to appear in establishments that “do not accept cash”. Strange as it may seem, the increasingly significant increase in the participation of technology in people’s lives has gradually made cash obsolete, a sign of the market and consumption immersion in an increasingly virtual universe.

Much of this process is justified by security and convenience. With smartphones, it has become easier whatsapp data to control your finances in real time using digital apps, without the hassle of carrying notes and coins in a physical wallet. Furthermore, security is based on the fact that a credit card does not carry any value in itself; it is a piece of magnetized plastic that opens an access door but does not allow entry without a password.

Of course, this is already obvious to the vast majority of people in the world, who buy, make transactions, deposits and payments every day with their credit cards. But the problem is precisely this: the more we naturalize things in our lives, the less problematic they seem to be.

For example, there is no doubt that the best option to save your money is to deposit it in a bank account, right? However, for those who lived in Brazil in the early 90s, this natural reality became a nightmare when the Collor government simply confiscated the money of Brazilians in their bank accounts.