Meet Barter Cards – US Virtual MasterCard that allows online payments in your existing currency

Barter is an online wallet that lets you create virtual cards 💳 that can be funded from your (home) bank account. It is more than that actually, one of their biggest offerings is tracking expense on each card – card management. For the payments part of their solution, they partnered with Flutterwave because it helps them scale across countries in Africa such as Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and South Africa.

So how does this concern me as an individual/corporate entity in any of these countries (E.g Nigeria)?

Well, if you are part of the privileged few with internet access, there is a high probability that you are making some transactions online. Now, if you do, there was a time when Nigerian debit cards were incapable of paying for online subscriptions such as Apple Music.

Read the lamentations from one of my favourite twitter personalities about his inability to pay for subscriptions due to DCC (Dynamic Currency Conversion) restrictions from the Central Bank:

https://twitter.com/UgoTalksAlot/status/812941360634490880

Dear Nigerian artistes. You know Nigerians don't have access to Apple Music or Spotify, but you keep releasing songs for us there. Why?

— Ugo (@UgoTalksAlot) January 18, 2017

But with Barter cards, that problem is solved. As from your Naira account, you can fund your account and then pay the dollar equivalent for online subscriptions.

More specifically, Barter cards will appeal more to Developers and Startups who happen to do a lot of online transactions such as paying for domain names, cloud hosting providers etc. As most of those transactions are usually in USD (same currency with your Barter Virtual Cards). Also, digital marketers who pay for FB ads and Adwords might find it useful.

But…we have Paystack, Flutterwave from Nigeria and what exactly is their purpose? 

Sadly, this post has not been set-up to look into their offerings. But one thing is clear, Paystack is NOT powered by Flutterwave.

How do you get started?

On their website, they have outlined 3 ways to get started and they are:

1. Create an account
2. Fund it
3. Spend

The Barter team has done a lot to put together How-to (use Barter Cards) guides for your favourite online subscriptions such as Apple, Netflix even Uber, Amazon, Asos. Visit their Medium blog for more about these.

In conclusion, what you’ll expect is that they make money somehow, and I believe this would be true small fees on the rates of conversions. Hence, if you do not own a domiciliary account (accounts that hold foreign currencies), you might be interested in giving this a try.

Let me know your experience with Barter. If you have any questions about this, be sure to visit their FAQ section.

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