Great pick up on this detail, it’s not common when opening a typical bank or card-based account.
Due to the nature of the cards we issue, secured credit cards with higher acceptance than debit and prepaid, Visa requires additional information around expected monthly spend, occupation, salary range and generic use case for how the cards will be used (i.e. Online shopping). These details are used by Visa as part of their approval process and not required if we were issuing a debit or prepaid card type.
Some simple questions, ones I would ask privacy if they were active as well.
Do you process payments directly through credit card networks (i.e., Visa) or do you integrate with any another payment service provider?
How do you manage fraud? Do you integrate with third party fraud vendors, have your own in-house fraud system, or are you largely deferring fraud management risk to end-users through virtual cards and relying on card networks? And if you integrate with fraud vendors, what information do you provide them, and do you ensure anonymity for end-users?
I ask point 2 as if a decline for a card is due to a possible high risk merchant, who is making the categorization of high risk in this flow? You, the card network, and/or a fraud vendor?
If I understand the OP correctly, this service allows you to provide fake details (name, address, etc.) to the merchant, but not to Halocard itself since KYC is required. Is this correct?
I would imagine it’s like opening a new bank account in North America. They ask, but they don’t quite verify to ensure of the same. They just need a metric to see what other banking or other financial products they target you with ads for.
There’s a lot that happens when a credit card is used to make a purchase that i won’t dive into here (this image has a great visualisation). In short, when you use your card, Visa routes the transaction and our issuing bank and issuer processor approve and settle it.
We don’t integrate with fraud vendors and we don’t retain a record of transaction information on our servers. The main implication for a cardholder is that Visa decides what merchant categories are considered “high-risk” and ultimately blocked from purchases. We maintain a list of those prohibited categories here: Are there merchant category restrictions for Halocard? | Halocard
Hi there! Great question. The address you provide for identity verification should correspond with your current location and country of residence, and is used as the default billing address for your cards.
Separately to this, when you create a new virtual card, you can specify an alternative billing address that you feel most comfortable providing a merchant.
Hello! Yes, we can implement support for cryptocurrency deposits other than Stablecoins, however our users aren’t actively requesting this. We currently provide free, 1:1 deposits for USDC and USDT which seem to be the most popular deposit method for our community.
There are no documents required for these 4 additional questions. The responses are used by Visa as part of their approval process. If it helps, we have users across both spectrums of high and low spending on the platform.
Monero offers anonymous payments and is often used to purchase KYC-free cards that are issued under a shell company or someone else’s name, which is inherently risky as the program (and any loaded funds) can be cancelled without notice.
This is completely different from private payments using virtual cards issued under your name that mask your personal details from merchants… but everyone is free to choose whichever approach they feel comfortable with.
