The CEO of WePay says that the demand for cryptocurrency isn’t high enough for payment companies to start offering it.
Bill Clerico said in a phone interview that his company is client-focused and hasn’t gotten enough requests to support cryptocurrency transactions, according to Bloomberg.
While Clerico did admit that “crypto is very interesting,” he said that his company hasn’t received much customer demand for it, and “no one has figured out a killer use case.”
So far, Square is the highest-profile payments company to allow users to buy bitcoin. Competitors like PayPal and Affirm are in line with WePay, saying there isn’t enough customer demand to offer the option of digital currencies.
“If consumer demand increases for any new form of currency, we will consider support for those new payment methods as they become relevant to our customers over time,” Amanda Christine Miller, a spokeswoman for PayPal, said in an email last year.
WePay was acquired in December by JPMorgan Chase & Co., but has continued to operate as a standalone company, “while also leveraging Chase’s broader capabilities and acting as a payments incubator for the firm,” the company said in a statement.
Of course, JPMorgan’s CEO has had plenty to say about bitcoin in the past. Last year, Jamie Dimon called it “a fraud.”
“The currency isn’t going to work,” he said at the time. “You can’t have a business where people can invent a currency out of thin air and think that people who are buying it are really smart.”
But by January, Dimon had softened his stance on the cryptocurrency. “I regret making [those comments],” he said. “The blockchain is real. You can have crypto yen and dollars and stuff like that.”
In fact, JPMorgan’s CFO Marianne Lake has said that the company is “open-minded” to the potential uses for digital currencies.