Binance Beyond Trading: Making Crypto Payments “Invisible” | Thomas Gregory on Binance Card, Pay

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]Next up, we're going to take a look even further ahead into crypto utility, building everyday utility beyond trading. And this is with a representation from the Binance team.

[00:00:10]So, I'm going to welcome to the stage Thomas, head of VIP of fiat and payments. So, Thomas, great to have you here. How are you doing?

[00:00:18]I'm good, thanks. Thanks for having me, Jessica.

[00:00:22]Pleasure to have you. Thank you so much for joining. We are 3 and 1/2 hours into the Binance online stream. So, a lot of alpha has gone on and we were hearing from Richard E earlier on the session on the 3 million 300 million to 3 billion users. And Thomas, we're bringing you on now to talk really about the everyday utility and how Binance is really building the architecture, the use case for that. So, we're going to dive in cuz we've got 10 minutes to really hear from you on what you and the team are working for. And also, what it means for the users of the Binance applications.

[00:00:55]First, let's talk about Binance as a platform. I think for a lot of people that may hear the name Binance, a few years ago it might have just represented a trading platform, but we've really scaled so much more from that. It's now looking at broader payments, cards, transfers, and then real financial world utility. So, I'd like to hear from you, Thomas, when you look at Binance today, what do you think have been some of the biggest shifts in how the company approaches financial services?

[00:01:21]>> [snorts] >> Uh yeah, uh that's a really good place to start.

[00:01:24]So, look, I think that uh obviously Binance has traditionally been a trading platform.

[00:01:30]But we've got a real opportunity here, and I'm fortunate enough cuz I actually work really at the coal face of this uh of actually trying to bring it to life and make it reality, right? But we've got a real big opportunity here to for Binance to move from being a trading platform into a broader financial services everyday payments platform. Um and I think that we kind of have to stop thinking of crypto or Binance just being a crypto exchange. We're trying to think of it as a broader place where you can come, experience day-to-day payment activities, financial services activities, have really simple, easy-to-use user experiences. And I don't know, I'll talk a little bit more about that as we go through.

[00:02:13]Um and really kind of use crypto in your daily life to make payments, to pay, to kind of just do things that you today you might use a payments company or a card or a bank for. Just do it all through Binance. That's kind of how how how we're looking at it. And there's a lot of detail there which we're going to get into. Um but overall, um we want there to be just a single platform. You can trade, sure, that's our core, that's our DNA. Uh but also you can you can send money, you can you can pay your bills, you can, you know, use it to buy buy online, etc. etc. And, you know, that's where we're going. Uh and yeah, that's the fun part of my job is to bring all that to life.

[00:02:53]And part of the job, probably the challenging part of the job, too, but I think you're absolutely spot-on when you reference the old model which was really like you have crypto, you kind of keep it separate, you work out what to do with it, and then you have your everyday financial near banking. And now what we are seeing is a convergence between traditional finance and crypto from digital assets. And then this more this next wave of crypto adoption.

[00:03:17]When we talk about the barriers that we do face for crypto adoption and the kind of goal of 1 billion, 3 billion users on chain, people often feel between these separate worlds as as you have just mentioned. There's traditional money on one side, and then if we look at the digital realms and ecosystems and the possibilities that are in the Web 3 digital asset blockchain space.

[00:03:40]What does it take to to bridge that gap?

[00:03:42]Cuz it sounds like it would be quite challenging to merge the two, but seamless user experience is obviously so critical for your your team's work at here at Binance. So, what does it take to build the two in your opinion?

[00:03:57]Yeah, and look, I think there is a perceived gap between TradFi, traditional payments, and crypto, but it's a perceived gap which there doesn't have to be one, right? Um Look, at at the end of the day, anyone in the world to make a payment is a hygiene factor.

[00:04:15]Um no one goes out shopping and goes, "I'm really looking forward to going to make a payment today." People go out and they enjoy because they're going shopping, because they're going to buy something, or they're or they're or they're doing something fun in their lives. The payment at the end of it is literally the the hygiene factor to to end the transaction, right? Um so, when we think of using crypto for payments, we've got to think of it the same way to put our users' needs and their at the very at the very center of this to break down all the little user frictions in the payments chain.

[00:04:48]Um my kind of background was originally in in TradFi, and it's amazing how difficult it is to make a payment for something that should be very simple.

[00:04:58]I'm buying something from a merchant, they give me a good, they take my money in return, but it's amazing how often that goes wrong. Uh payments get stuck.

[00:05:07]There's lots of reasons your card gets declined or your payment gets declined, and then uh users get frustrated.

[00:05:14]With When we use crypto payments, we've got an opportunity to completely break that down uh to make it really seamless for users to use crypto in their day-to-day lives.

[00:05:24]Whether they're buying something online, whether they're buying something in a store, um or whether they're just sending their friends money or their family money, whatever it might be, uh we can make that as seamless as we possibly can and really make payments a hygiene factor.

[00:05:38]Um if we can do that, then uh the infrastructure behind payments, uh whether it's on traditional rails or whether it's on the blockchain, um can be completely invisible to users and seamless.

[00:05:51]And and that's how I believe kind of crypto can really dominate and really be the predominant way to pay over the next kind of 5-10 years as as we kind of drive this this new new way to use crypto in day-to-day lives.

[00:06:08]Yeah, and absolutely you have mentioned there using crypto in day-to-day life and a seamless manner in which you are doing so so that anyone that kind of crypto curious is able to spend their crypto. It doesn't have to be someone that is really has high technical awareness. It kind of rolls nicely onto our next question and for those that have been watching the stream throughout the day they will have seen some rolling video clips and segments that we do have promoting the eligible users that can now spend U dollar on Binance card alongside benefits like cashback incentives, zero fees, and zero effects.

[00:06:43]And this is a really significant campaign when it comes to just looking at spending in everyday lives, incentivizing a really seamless user experience as well. So, I'd love you to talk about the the launch that we have seen today, what it means for for Binance, but what it means for crypto payments and where they could be headed next.

[00:07:01]Yeah, we're we're quite excited by this.

[00:07:04]This is this is a fun little campaign, right? So, users will be able to use their Binance card and if they use use stable coin, then they're going to pay zero conversion fee, they're going to pay zero effects, and they're going to get paid 15% cashback on their purchases, right?

[00:07:25]And that campaign is running until the end of May.

[00:07:29]Actually, the zero conversion and zero effects will run a little bit longer.

[00:07:35]The The important thing about this is it's just bringing crypto into day-to-day spending, right? And it's really kind of highlighting the fact, but you can use crypto to use your card to buy something online, to buy something in store, anywhere where you are in the world, right? So, it's just a nice little proof point that crypto can be completely seamless and frictionless for users, right?

[00:07:59]They're using a card which they used to using in day-to-day life, but it's just crypto that's funding it underneath. And also, we want to give them a little incentive and award reward to kind of try it for the first time and get some benefit from that.

[00:08:12]So, it's kind of like a signal as well of bigger things to come. Stablecoins for me are not just for kind of trading or kind of for holding to storing value.

[00:08:25]We're actually using stablecoins now.

[00:08:28]And in this instance, you stablecoin to actually use it for day-to-day spending in kind of in day-to-day lives as well. So, yeah, this for me this is a a nice little uh initiative and nice little promo, but we really hope it's going to really drive users our users to kind of really get used to using their card in this way.

[00:08:51]But may maybe kind of I touch on something else as well.

[00:08:55]Card's really important, but there's other things which we're doing as well to try to get day-to-day spending into in in into mainstream users' lives as well. So, last week we talked a little bit about national QR as well. So, within Binance with Binance Pay, we're also integrating into a number of national QR codes. So, this is for in-store payments as well.

[00:09:18]So, if I'm a user in Brazil or if I'm a say a tourist that's visiting Vietnam, I can just like scan the national QR code the QR in a in-store terminal. And then again, I'm just using my my stablecoins sitting in my Binance app to be able to pay for something in on an on an ongoing basis. So, we're bringing again these kind of day-to-day experiences on how to pay in a really easy-to-use, simplistic way for users to experience for the first time. So, that there's So, there's the U campaign today, there's the QR one we announced last week, and there's more to come. So, yeah, we're bringing payments to life is what we're trying to do.

[00:09:59]And certainly these activations, and you've mentioned different regions around the world that you are implementing from QR systems to different campaigns. It's also stable coins as well, and that is a use case and what that can bring to to merchants and to individuals and businesses as well around the world. It's It's powerful, and I think it's one of the reasons why we're all in this space and we're also passionate about it. You mentioned that bigger things to come, and we did have Eon earlier on in the live stream, and she was talking about Binance's ambitious goal to go from our current 320 million users all the way up to 3 billion users, and what that looks like, and one of the main Yep, kind of why's that is really to build a financial super app and to see the opportunities and the prosperous that that brings to users around the world and the impact that that will have on their lives.

[00:10:46]When it comes to the bigger picture of what are the kind of pieces that the Binance team and and you and your team are working incredibly hard on doing that, what kind of pieces are Binance looking to bring to this financial super app to make this vision real and come to life?

[00:11:02]Yeah, I mean I mean, look, I think it's a great ambition, right, to move to like 3 billion users.

[00:11:08]And then we've So, you used to talk about that. Rich has been talking about financial inclusion as well, and this is all part of the same story, I think.

[00:11:16]But, if we're going to move to Binance being kind of super app, where you can have a single app where you can do multiple different activities, you can I think there's probably three areas which I can look at. You can use it to make payments by crypto in in daily life and we've talked about Binance card, we talked about Binance Pay, right? Um you can use it to hold your funds with us.

[00:11:41]You might get paid your salary. Uh you might want to hold funds. Maybe you want to get some yield or reward in return for holding the funds. Um and then you can use it to like send funds as well, right? So if I want to remit funds to friends or family or um overseas or wherever I want to send funds to, then these are some of the things which I'd want to be able to do within within my super app. Um and I also want to be able to do that in multi-currency as well. So uh different people have different uh user experiences, but if I travel overseas for example, I might want to have an account where I can hold uh different currencies um so I can operate locally when I'm when I'm traveling. So there's lots of different user experiences which we want to give. But ultimately anything which you can do today, which today you use say your bank for or you use a financial services provider for or you use an app for, um these are the type of services which the payments team we're trying to build into Binance so that all of our all Binance users can actually experience that themselves. Um I'll just add one thing though. Um What a what a user wants or how a user pays for something in say Mexico is very different to how a user pays for something in say Vietnam or Australia or in Namibia in Africa. Um so the only way we're going to really be successful in this as well is really kind of driving into local needs of our users.

[00:13:15]Uh and we need to deliver experiences which are relevant for our users wherever they are in the world, right?

[00:13:21]So we're going to take like a much more of kind of a localization or hyper-localization approach um where we really our users to be able to really experience relevant payment experience for them where they are in the world, right?

[00:13:35]And so, yeah, this is what makes it very exciting because we we got a lot of work to do that. But when when when we get this right, hopefully our 300 million plus users today and 3 billion users in the future will be able to kind of experience these day-to-day financial experiences which which which we're going to be building.

[00:13:55]Sure, watch this space. Well, a huge congratulations on the the campaign going live today and the QR codes you mentioned two weeks. And we'll keep our eyes posted for further updates from you and the team, Thomas. Thank you so much for joining us today. Most appreciated and great to have you join us.

[00:14:08]Thanks. Thanks very much, Jessica.