Banqa pays Visa Infinite straight from your own USDC wallet — if you already hold the stablecoin

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

The Banqa card sits in an unusual middle ground. It is not a bank card with crypto attached, and it is not a custodial exchange card where a platform holds your money for you. It is a Visa Infinite — virtual and physical, usable in Apple Pay and Google Pay — that is backed by USDC sitting in a self-custody smart-contract wallet you control the keys to. That single design choice explains both what is genuinely good about this card and where it will trip you up.

Here is the blunt version. If you already hold USDC, you already keep your own keys, and you want to spend that balance at ordinary shops without converting it by hand first, Banqa is a reasonable instrument and the numbers on it are not predatory. If you are trying to solve the problem of not having a usable bank card at all, or you are starting from zero with no stablecoins, this card answers a question you are not asking. The eligibility side is the weak point, not the pricing: Banqa does not publish a country list, and it says only that eligibility depends on residence and applicable rules, confirmed during application and KYC. You will find out whether you qualify by applying, which is a genuinely unpleasant way to find out.

I score it 7.1 out of 10.

The conditions described on this page are current as of October 28, 2026.

Verdict: 7.1 out of 10, built for people who already hold USDC

The 9 for everyday use is the highest single mark across any card in this comparison group, and it is easy to see why. A Visa Infinite that works in a mobile wallet, in both virtual and physical form, is about as frictionless as a payment card gets. The 6 for eligibility drags the average down, and it should. A card you cannot get is not a cheap card; it is a card that costs you the time and the paperwork of an application.

The score for cost deserves a word, because 1.99% foreign exchange sounds steep until you compare it against what a normal bank charges on a foreign purchase — and because the deposits are free, which is the fee that actually matters for someone spending their own USDC.

Will they give you the card?

Here is the honest answer, and it is short: nobody outside Banqa can tell you in advance.

Banqa does not publish a list of countries where the card is available. What the company says is that “Eligibility depends on residence and applicable rules”, and that this is confirmed during the application and KYC process. A supported-countries page exists and is linked from the site, but its contents are not something the public pages state in a way you can rely on before signing up. So the practical test is not “which country am I in” but “will this particular residence pass this particular check” — and that is decided after you submit documents, not before.

There is a second, less obvious layer. Residency is not the only thing that gets screened. Card issuers generally record nationality and country of birth separately from address, because sanctions screening and risk policy are applied to citizenship as well as to where you live. Banqa does not publish how it treats dual citizens, or what happens to someone living in a supported country who holds an ID from a restricted one. If you hold two passports and one of them is awkward, that is worth asking support about directly rather than discovering at the review stage.

One more practical note on who gets approved: age requirements are not stated. Cards in this category are generally adult products, and most issuers set 18 as the floor, but I will not fill Banqa’s silence with an assumption.

How to get it

The application is a standard identity check. You need a government ID — passport, national ID or driver’s licence — plus proof of address dated within the last three months. Higher verification tiers may additionally ask for source-of-funds documents, meaning evidence of where the money you are depositing came from.

Timing splits into two paths, and this matters for planning:

• Automated checks usually complete within minutes, so many applicants see a decision the same day.
• Manual reviews take 24 to 48 hours.
• Failed checks can be retried from the dashboard rather than starting over.

What you end up with is a verification tier, and the tier drives your limits — daily, weekly and monthly. The names of the tiers and the amounts attached to them are not published, so the practical effect is that you apply, get placed somewhere, and discover your ceiling afterwards.

The card itself is a Visa Infinite, available virtual and physical; business customers get both as well. The card currency is USD, which is the root of the foreign exchange fee discussed below. Shipping a physical card costs $39.00, covering issuance and delivery. Which countries it ships to, and how long it takes, are not stated — worth asking before you pay for a card that arrives in a different month than you expect.

Fees: what it really costs

The cost picture is the strongest part of this card, with one asterisk: the ATM fees.

Three of those lines deserve context rather than a number.

The absence of an annual fee is a real advantage, but only on the Standard tier. A “Standard tier” is named in the card’s own material as having no annual fee. Other tiers exist and their benefits are not stated. So “free” is accurate for the entry level and tells you nothing about the rest of the range.

The FX fee is the number that shows up in real life. The card is USD-based, so anything you buy priced in euros, pounds or anything else carries 1.99%. It is charged on the transaction, and it is unavoidable in the sense that you cannot switch the card’s currency. For a US resident this never appears. For someone spending across borders most weeks, it is the single largest ongoing cost on the card, larger than anything else in the table.

The ATM pricing is where the “free” framing cracks. A withdrawal is $1.50 fixed, plus 1% of the amount and $1 for end users, and there is a $0.60 fee for a balance, decline or authorisation check. That last one stings in a specific way: a declined withdrawal at a machine can cost you money on top of the failed withdrawal. No free allowance is stated, so I would not assume any number of withdrawals is included. If you expect to use cash, this is the number to ask about before you rely on it.

Now the everyday cases, because that is where fees either show up or don’t.

A coffee in your own country. You tap, the balance drops by the price of the coffee, nothing else is charged. No FX, no conversion step, no percentage. This is the case the card was designed for and it costs exactly what the coffee costs.

A hotel in another currency. Say your card is USD-based and the hotel charges you in a different currency. The amount is converted and 1.99% is added on the non-USD transaction. There is no separate conversion fee layered on top, because the conversion is part of the card’s mechanics rather than a step you perform — but the FX fee is real and it is the number to keep in mind for anything abroad.

Taking money out at an ATM abroad. This is the expensive one. $1.50, then 1% of the amount, then $1 — plus whatever the ATM’s owner charges you, which the card’s own schedule does not cover. If the withdrawal is declined, $0.60. I would treat Banqa as a card for spending and only occasionally for cash.

Per-transaction limits can be set by yourself, which is one of the more useful controls here. It is the natural way to cap a single purchase if you are testing the card in an unfamiliar shop.

How to top up

Topping up is where this card is genuinely different from most of its competitors, and the difference runs through everything.

USDC is held in a self-custody smart-contract wallet — on Base, Arbitrum or Ethereum. Not with Banqa. Not with a custodian. With you. The wallet’s keys are yours, which means the card arrangement sits on top of your own funds rather than on top of a company’s.

The fee for topping up with USDC is zero. The site puts it plainly: “Zero deposit fees”. Other assets or networks cost from free to 1% depending on the route, which is the standard pattern for on-chain conversion — a swap from a token you hold into the one the card wants takes a cut somewhere in the chain.

Two things to get right, and both are irreversible if you get them wrong.

First, the network. The site says to hold USDC on Base and Arbitrum, and to send only USDC on Base. If you send USDC over a network the card does not support, or to an address belonging to a different network, the funds can be lost or need manual recovery with no guarantee — blockchain transfers do not reverse. Check the address and the network before you confirm anything, every time.

Second, USDC itself is not risk-free just because it is called a stablecoin. Stablecoins aim to hold a stable value against a fiat currency, but as the BIS noted in July 2025, roughly 90% of stablecoin market capitalisation sits in USDT and USDC, and Circle describes USDC as redeemable 1:1 for dollars and fully backed by cash and cash equivalents, mostly in an SEC-registered government money market fund with monthly reserve attestations. That is a strong backing story. It is not the same as a bank deposit, and stablecoins have depegged before — TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022, and USDC lost its peg briefly in March 2023 during the US banking crisis.

Withdrawing goes the other way: USDC moves from the card’s collateral back to your self-custody wallet via an on-chain authorisation. An offramp fee is given as “1% + $3.00” on the home page. Closing the account costs $10.00, one-time.

So the full round trip is: free in, free to spend, and 1% plus $3.00 if you pull everything back out — a number worth weighing against what you would have paid to sell stablecoins into fiat on an exchange.

Paying with it every day

This is the card’s best section, and the reason the everyday-use mark is 9.

Apple Pay and Google Pay are both supported. That is the practical difference between a card you use and a card that sits in a drawer: most card terminals take contactless, and a phone-based wallet is what you actually reach for. Tokenised mobile wallets store a device-specific number rather than your card number, and generate a fresh security code per payment.

The card tier is high. Visa Infinite is not the entry-level plastic. For anyone who cares about lounge access, travel benefits or acceptance in premium contexts, that matters. The card’s own material does not detail the benefit package, so I would check the Visa Infinite terms rather than assume.

No cashback is stated. What there is instead is a referral programme: 0.15% of your friends’ spend, plus a $10 bonus per friend who reaches $500 of spend. If you were hoping for a rewards card, this is not one. If you were hoping to bring people in with you, the maths is legible enough to model yourself.

Blocked merchant categories are not stated. This is a real gap, and it is worth raising before you rely on the card. Most issuers block certain categories by policy rather than by law — gambling is the usual example, covered by MCC 7995 — but the list varies by issuer and is published only where the issuer publishes it. Banqa does not, as far as the public pages say. Ask.

There is one more thing that belongs in this section rather than hidden: chargeback handling appears in the fee schedule as a disclosed fee. The process and time frames are not described anywhere public. A chargeback is the mechanism through which an issuer orders a refund when a payment was fraudulent, duplicated or for goods never received — it is the main protection you have when a shop takes your money and gives you nothing. That this card lists it as a cost, without describing how it works, should factor into how you feel about disputes before you spend your whole balance at one unfamiliar merchant.

What can go wrong

Your keys, your loss. Self-custody is the card’s best feature and its sharpest edge. A seed phrase is typically 12 to 24 words and is an unencrypted form of your private key; anyone who obtains it can restore the wallet and spend the funds. On-chain transfers are irreversible, so the network cannot freeze or return what goes out. Compare that with custodial platforms, which have a public record of failure: Mt. Gox reported about US$350 million stolen between 2011 and 2014, Coincheck about US$400 million in 2018, Ronin Network US$625 million in 2022. Banqa is not asking you to take that risk. It is asking you to take a different one — phishing, clipboard malware that swaps a copied address, and your own mistake.

The recovery phrase is shown once and Banqa cannot recover it. That is the honest design of self-custody, not a bug. But read it as a fact: if you lose it, nobody is coming to help you.

You are trusting a programme you cannot fully name. Banqa is a brand of Codego Group. The cards are “issued by a Visa Principal Member pursuant to a license from Visa”. Banqa states it is not a bank, and the issuer’s name and licences are not published. That structure is normal for this category — the brand markets and manages the programme, a licensed issuer holds the card account — but it means the party you would complain to about a frozen card is not the party whose name is on the front of your statement.

Programmes like this close. It is not a criticism of Banqa specifically; it is the category’s weather. In November 2022 Visa said it had “terminated our global agreements with FTX” and the FTX US debit card programme was wound down by its issuer. WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. Closures typically follow a pattern: notice, then loading and spending stop, then users are asked to withdraw remaining balances. Because Banqa’s own offramp is a self-custody withdrawal rather than a bank transfer, that last step is somewhat in your favour — but plan for the notice period, not the assumption.

What little track record exists is thin. Trustpilot shows 3.7 on a single review, a five-star review from July 2026, with no complaint themes simply because there is one review and the company has not invited reviews. One review is not a reputation. It is barely a data point.

Declines can cost you. A declined authorisation may leave a hold on funds for several days, typically up to seven. And Banqa charges $0.60 for a balance, decline or authorisation check at an ATM. Address verification is another quiet source of declines: the service compares numeric parts of your billing address against issuer records, is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK, and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards.

There is no address to escalate to. Support is by email, with replies usually within 24 hours, plus a help centre and contact pages. That is the whole support picture. News and announcements are not stated anywhere the public pages make usable.

On the security side, the picture is genuinely good. Instant card freeze in the app, card details shown for 60 seconds, email OTP or Google two-factor authentication, passkeys rolling out, penetration tests by Codego, and SOC 2 controls. Banqa disables the card instantly from the app — that is the control most people reach for first.

Regulation is not a shield. In the EU, MiCA has applied to e-money tokens since 30 June 2024 and to crypto-asset service providers since 30 December 2024, with a transitional period running until 1 July 2026 at the latest for providers operating under national law. E-money tokens may only be issued by a credit institution or an electronic money institution. EMIs must safeguard customer funds in segregated accounts or insurance — but such funds are not bank deposits and may not be covered by a deposit guarantee scheme. If due diligence cannot be completed, institutions are required to stop, and where necessary close, the relationship. That is why accounts freeze pending documents, and it is why “my documents were rejected” is a normal outcome rather than a sign something went wrong.

Taxes. Digital assets are treated as property in the US, so spending them produces a taxable gain or loss, measured in local fiat currency at the fair market value on the transaction date. Each card payment funded from crypto may therefore be a separate disposal. I am not giving tax advice and this is not advice — but the practical point is that paying a coffee with USDC is a taxable event in many jurisdictions, and the number of taxable events scales with how often you tap.

What to take instead

Three alternatives, and the comparison is more interesting on cost than on eligibility.

MetaMask matches Banqa’s score and beats it on one thing that matters: you can read the eligibility list before you apply. Sign-up is open in 45 listed countries and territories — Andorra, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Germany, France, Spain, Uruguay among them — with a waitlist elsewhere, and US and UK sign-ups temporarily closed per the FAQ. It is Mastercard rather than Visa. The virtual card is free with no annual or maintenance fee; the metal card is $199 a year. It spends directly from your connected wallet on Linea, Base, Monad or Solana, holding mUSD, wETH, EURe, GBPe, USDC or USDT. And it pays real cashback: 1% on the virtual card, up to 3% on Metal for the first $10,000 of spend, with a footnote dropping that to 1% afterwards. The catch is that it is custodial-adjacent through its issuer and provider — Monovate and Crypto Life — and the transaction fee is described only as “minimal”.

KAST is the one to look at if fees are your priority and you have budget. Its Standard tier is genuinely free, with 1.5% cashback on the first $2,000 a month, zero top-up fee, zero spend fee, and 0.5%–1.75% FX depending on where you live and which programme you are on. Premium runs to $1,000 a year with 2% on the first $10,000 monthly; Private is $10,000 a year with 3% on the first $40,000. It also holds up to 10 cards per user across Visa Platinum, Infinite metal and Infinite gold-plated designs, with USD balances converted 1:1 from stablecoins at 0% spread. Its eligibility rules are also unpublished, and its citizenship screening is stricter than most — a supported residence with an ID from a restricted region can still fail KYC, and a VPN does not help.

TokenPocket is the weakest of the four on the numbers, at 5.8, and the reason is its 1% fee on every crypto deposit. That fee is described as refunded later through rewards or reduced transaction fees, which is a promise about the future in exchange for a charge today. Its virtual Fiat24 cards are virtual only — no physical card is mentioned — and the Americas were listed as planned rather than live.

Who I would recommend it to

Banqa fits you if all three of these are true: you hold USDC, you keep your own keys, and you want to spend that balance at ordinary merchants without converting it first. In that specific situation the card is efficient — free deposits, no conversion step, no annual fee on the entry tier, and Apple Pay and Google Pay on a Visa Infinite. The cost table has nothing predatory in it except the ATM column, and I would simply plan not to rely on cash machines.

Banqa does not fit you if any of these apply:

• You need a card urgently and cannot afford to discover through a KYC review that your residence is unsupported. There is no published list. That is the deal-breaker for anyone in a hurry.
• You do not hold USDC. Everything here runs through one stablecoin on three networks. Starting from another asset means paying the 0–1% route fee, and starting from fiat means an exchange first.
• You want cashback. There is none stated, and the referral maths is not a rewards programme.
• You plan to live on ATM withdrawals. That is where the pricing gets sharp, and the decline check fee makes a failed withdrawal cost you.
• You are uneasy owning your own keys. Self-custody here means Banqa genuinely cannot recover a lost recovery phrase, and the protection that comes with it — a frozen card in two taps — is the trade you are making.

If I were choosing today and my country appeared on a competitor’s eligibility list, I would weigh MetaMask for the free tier and the actual cashback, and KAST if I spent enough for the tier economics to matter. I would come to Banqa for one specific reason: it is the only one of these that lets me keep the USDC in a wallet I control, and for a person who has already decided that is the arrangement they want, that is worth more than a percentage point of cashback.

Before signing up anywhere, three questions earn their keep: which countries the card is actually supported in, what my verification tier’s daily and monthly limits are, and what happens to my balance if the programme shuts. Ask all three, and read the answers before you deposit anything.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Banqa card?

The Banqa card is a Visa Infinite, virtual and physical, that spends USDC you hold yourself. The USDC sits in a self-custody smart-contract wallet on Base, Arbitrum or Ethereum, with keys you control, and the card draws against that balance. It is not a bank card and Banqa says plainly that it is not a bank. The brand belongs to Codego Group, and the cards are issued by a Visa Principal Member under a Visa licence. It also supports Apple Pay and Google Pay.

How does Banqa card work?

You deposit USDC into a self-custody wallet, and the card spends that collateral directly. There is no manual conversion step — USDC is spent against the collateral automatically, so a purchase simply reduces the balance. The card currency is USD, so purchases in other currencies carry a 1.99% foreign exchange fee. Because the funds are yours rather than the company’s, the card cannot overdraw, and you can withdraw USDC back to your own wallet by on-chain authorisation.

Is Banqa a bank?

No. Banqa states it is not a bank, and it is a brand of Codego Group. The cards are issued by a Visa Principal Member pursuant to a license from Visa, which is the normal structure for this category — a licensed issuer holds the card programme while the brand manages and markets it. Banqa does not name the issuer or its licences. One of the small corporate fees listed is literally “account residency (Visa Corporate)” at $3.00, which hints at a corporate-style arrangement rather than a retail bank account.

Is Banqa card available in my country?

There is no published country list. Banqa’s position is that eligibility depends on residence and applicable rules, confirmed during the application and KYC process. A supported-countries page is linked from the site but the public pages do not spell the list out. Nationality is typically screened separately from address, so holding an ID from a restricted region may matter even with a supported residence. Age requirements are not stated. The only reliable answer comes from applying or from emailing support.

How do I get a Banqa card?

You need a government ID — passport, national ID or driver’s licence — plus proof of address dated within three months; higher tiers may request source-of-funds documents. Automated checks usually complete in minutes, manual reviews take 24 to 48 hours, and failed checks can be retried from the dashboard. The card is Visa Infinite in virtual and physical form. Physical issuance and shipping is $39.00; delivery countries and time are not stated.

Does Banqa require KYC, and what does it involve?

Yes. Identity verification is part of the application, and your verification tier then governs your daily, weekly and monthly limits — though the tier names and amounts are not published. In the EU, customer due diligence normally covers name, address, date of birth, nationality, identity documents, a sanctions check, the purpose of the relationship, and whether you are a politically exposed person. If due diligence cannot be completed, rules require the institution to hold off or close the relationship, so document rejections are routine rather than a sign of anything wrong.

How do I top up the Banqa card?

You send USDC to the self-custody smart-contract wallet, on Base, Arbitrum or Ethereum, and deposits in USDC carry zero fees. Other assets or networks cost from free to 1% depending on the route. The critical detail is the network: Banqa says to hold USDC on Base and Arbitrum and to send only USDC on Base. Blockchain transfers are irreversible, so sending on an unsupported network or to another network’s address can lose the funds or require manual recovery with no guarantee.

Is Banqa card safe?

The security controls are solid: instant card freeze in the app, card details displayed for 60 seconds, email OTP or Google two-factor authentication, passkeys rolling out, penetration testing by Codego and SOC 2 controls. But self-custody is the risk you are taking on. Banqa shows your recovery phrase once and cannot recover it, crypto transfers cannot be reversed, and you carry the risk of phishing and clipboard malware. Custody is where large exchange hacks have happened; self-custody is where your own key management matters.

Is Banqa card free?

Mostly. There is no annual fee on the Standard tier, USDC deposits are free, and spending USDC involves no conversion fee. Charges you should know about: $39.00 for a physical card with delivery, 1.99% FX on non-USD transactions, $1.50 per ATM withdrawal plus 1% and $1 for end users, $0.60 for a balance, decline or authorisation check at an ATM, $5.00 for corporate card issuing, $10.00 to close the account, and an offramp example of 1% + $3.00.

How do I withdraw money from Banqa, and what about charges?

You authorise an on-chain transfer that moves USDC from the card’s collateral back to your self-custody wallet. The offramp fee given on the home page is 1% + $3.00. Closing the account costs $10.00 one-time. Since the funds are in a wallet you control rather than a bank account, the withdrawal route is yours to choose — but the network fee itself is charged by the blockchain, not by the card.

Where can I use the card, and what about blocked merchants?

You can use it wherever Visa is accepted, in person online, and through Apple Pay and Google Pay — which covers most day-to-day spending. Which merchant categories are blocked is not stated, and that varies by issuer rather than by law, so it is worth asking directly. One practical source of declines: address verification compares numeric parts of your billing address against issuer records, is mainly offered in the US, Canada and UK, and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards.

Content created by the «cryptocardcheck» team