BitPay partners with industry giant Global Payments

Atlanta-based bitcoin payment processor BitPay announced a new partnership yesterday with a true titan of the payment industry, Global Payments. With over $2.4 billion in revenue last year Global Payments has a significant presence in almost every industry where money changes hands, particularly in credit card, debit card and EBT card markets. The company has more in common with BitPay than an interest in helping move money around the planet, as Global Payments is also headquartered in Atlanta.

Speaking with CoinDesk about the referral-based partnership, Global Payments Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications, Amy Corn, explained that flexibility of payment options for their customers inspired the BitPay deal:

We’re a service business and we’re agnostic to payment types, so it’s important for us to provide our partners and merchants with the ability to accept any payment anytime, anywhere.”

Although the benefits of the partnership will largely be indirect, with Global Payments referring clients who want to accept bitcoin to BitPay and helping to integrate their BTC payments with services, the deal lends further legitimacy to both BitPay’s system and bitcoin’s utility. Global Payments works with over a million customers in the U.S., U.K, E.U. and in many emerging market countries.

The deal is hardly one-sided, however. With bitcoin becoming major news in the payments world due to dramatically reduced fees and an inherently international nature, Global Payments becomes one of only a handful of large-scale payment companies to have any connection, however informal, to the rapidly rising crypto-payments industry.