Herminio Fernandez: “Eurocoinpay’s customers can charge their card with cryptocurrencies and spend them at Zara, Repsol…”

Eurocoinpay is the platform for payments and charges in cryptocurrencies. The app is available for Android and Apple. It allows you to pay and collect the cryptocurrency that you choose in restaurants, supermarkets or other types of shops on a daily basis. In addition, it permits customers to make and receive micropayments, as well as send funds anywhere in the world with cryptocurrencies, automatically and in real time.

How does Eurocoinpay work?

We have four digital lines in our business model. Firstly, we created a cryptographic Token (Eurocointoken) which is available in trading markets around the world, this Token allows you to pay in merchants and companies globally. The transactions are very fast, economic and secure. Secondly, you can buy and sell cryptocurrencies at our own bank, called Exchange, with the bank cards or global transfers. Thirdly, we allow any digital assets to be exchanged for euros immediately and these to be loaded onto bank cards to make purchases in multinational companies. Finally, the payment gateway and app allows you to pay with the mobiles globally in any shop or company, in no more than eight seconds, with 0% of commissions.

How many cryptocurrencies are you working with right now?

We chose 22 cryptocurrencies which have an important market capitalization and above all must have a technological project behind them. There are many currencies created only for speculation and most end up with zero value.

How is the industry today?

We need legal certainty and we will only have that with legislation that regulates the world of crypto. Although it is true that all innovations come almost always before regulations but we believe in the success in that industry. In the future the digital world will create 20 percent of all jobs within 15 years. The sector is more alive than ever, as companies such as Facebook, Google, Telegram, etc. after making some very tough criticisms, have ended up embracing them. Also, J.M Morgan Bank will launch its JMP Coin digital coin at the end of 2019 and some Spanish Bank is yet making international payments with the Ripple coin.

Moreover, the German government, by means of its financial regulator Bafin, has just authorised the German company Fundament to take out the first real estate bonds regulated in digital Token. The value of these bonds is 200,000 million euros, with an interest rate of 4.5 percent for its investors. In this way, I believe that there are few sectors with as much future as the digital sector.

Are there many establishments in Spain that accept this type of payment?

I have not exact data of merchants that accept cryptocurrencies in Spain. For instance, the companies like Expedia, KFC, Paypal through the Coinbase platform, Microsoft, Fotocasa, etc, they do accept them as a means of payment. We have a waiting list of more than 300 hundred companies. The fact is that shops can charge in cryptocurrencies and instantly exchange them for euros. However, our customers can load their cards with cryptocurrencies in order to be spent in companies such as Zara, El Corte Inglés, Repsol, etc..

Currently, the news of the cryptocurrency of Facebook Libra are all over the place. What effects do you think its launch could bring on the market?

I would ask myself whether Facebook would select people who can use Libra or people who have restricted their platform will also have their currency. Libra is backed by 27 major companies, Visa, MasterCard, Paypal, and companies that will accept your currency like Uber, Booking, Ebay, Spotify, etc. I am not an enthusiast of this project, since it is not a decentralized payment network, it means that it can be managed by the company or people.

The payment network Blockchain bitcoin is a decentralized payment network, so no company or person can control it. In fact, every change in the code is public and transparent, thousands of computers around the world register and process their transactions, which are public and immutable. They can never be deleted and there is no total anonymity, since all their movements are registered and can be verified in the Blockchain network.

What advantages does it have for a business to accept crypto coins as a form of payment?

I would highlight three very important advantages: speed, economy and security. Speed since a payment with crypto coins does not require more than 6/8 seconds if we make it with platforms with very disruptive technology like EurocoinPay, and if we do it through the network Blockchain, the transaction can last several minutes.

Economical: for online merchants who work with products and sales services with very low commissions, charging with crypto coins means doubling their profits, since their commissions in some cases are of cents of euro. On the other hand we have the physical merchants where the commissions of the payment terminals are very low.

Security: The majority of places on the planet have two-thirds of payments made with credit cards. That technology is more than 60 years old and was never designed for the Internet, each transaction requires personal data, such as name and address, the databases of the cards are checked regularly, allowing us to charge our accounts for fraudulent purchases.

This cannot happen using our platform.

Media: eleconomista.es