In August of last year Payza enabled customers to begin purchasing bitcoins directly on the Payza website. Payza is an online payment platform which allows anyone with an email address to send and receive money online. At the time Charlie Shrem was involved with the launch and it now appears that Payza plans on adding a merchant acceptance system for bitcoin to the platform.
Executive VP of Strategic Partnerships and Corporate Affairs, Firoz Patel explained the company stance on bitcoin saying,
The ultimate goal is to give our members a secure option to store their bitcoins in their Payza accounts, but we are working towards that goal in incremental steps. First we gave our members a way to buy Bitcoin directly from Payza, then we gave them a way to sell Bitcoin to us, that’s where we are currently. Our aim is to be able to treat Bitcoin like any other currency we deal with, that means letting members hold Bitcoin in their Payza accounts, and letting them send and receive bitcoins through our network, but we’re not there yet. That said, we have no intention of slowing down the adoption of Bitcoin services on the Payza platform.
Payza has expressed interest in the cryptocurrency and is preparing an update to the platform that adds the ability for merchants to begin accepting bitcoin and exchange it for another currency or to hold the coins.
Our next step is to give our merchants a way to process Bitcoin payments, while receiving funds in the currency of their choice. This gives our merchants wider access to customers, it gives Bitcoin users more places to spend their bitcoins, and it satisfies our goal of minimizing the risk to our members.
The company states it has begun testing the merchant platform and intends on rolling it out in the near future.