The UK’s Gemini teams up with a blanket take on crypto payments

Plaid announced on Thursday (July 28) that it is working with cryptocurrency exchange Gemini to allow Gemini users to share account balance details and get a better overview of financial planning.

In a company blog post, Plaid said that despite a growing interest in crypto, many people continue to face barriers to entry, with onboarding often meant only for experts.

Some of the major issues include difficulty understanding how to open an account or confusion over what documents to submit, along with issues with financing accounts. Plaid and Gemini are reportedly trying to work on ways to bridge the traditional financial and crypto ecosystems.

“Now, Plaid and Gemini are working to simplify the user onboarding process, including making it faster and easier for Gemini users to fund their crypto accounts,” Plaid said in its announcement.

Through the partnership, Plaid’s open banking platform offers an easy way for Gemini customers in the US and UK to open and fund new accounts. Gemini customers can reportedly convert fiat to crypto more easily, and the two companies also want to work more on building experiences related to growing digital asset portfolios.

Plaid has also recently debuted a tool in beta to help with variable periodic payments (VRP) for UK consumers and businesses. VRPs allow users to authenticate only once, allowing future automated payments to occur without verification.

See also: Plaid Pilot’s payment tool to streamline recurring payments

Plaid said Expensify, a payment super app, has used VRP to streamline money management for expenses, business cards and bills. Plaid’s VRP also helped Expensify automatically deduct variable repayments from customers’ business accounts to settle card balances.

“Our aim is to bring the Expensify card to the UK as quickly as possible while maintaining the same industry-leading standards as our US version of the card: a direct and seamless integration with the Expensify app, easy options to automate card payments, and transparency through the entire expense and pre-accounting process,” Sophie Pinto-Raetz, head of the UK Expensify Card launch, said in a blog post at the time.

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