Banqa Card Review: A Self-Custody Visa for USDC Holders, With Questions

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

If you are looking for a payment card that spends from crypto you hold yourself — rather than from an account a platform keeps for you — the Banqa card is worth putting on your shortlist. It is a Visa Infinite, it works in Apple Pay and Google Pay, and you keep your own keys the whole time. That is a genuinely different proposition from most cards in this category.

But it is not a finished answer for everyone. The card’s own public pages leave several things unsaid: which countries are supported, what the ATM withdrawal allowance is, what the other verification tiers cost, and who actually issues the card. Those gaps are not dealbreakers if you already know what you need; they are dealbreakers if you were hoping to read them before applying. Below I go through what the card says, what it does not, and who I would hand it to.

The conditions described here are current as of October 28, 2026.

The short verdict

I scored Banqa 7.1 out of 10. That is a good score, not a perfect one. The card does the everyday things well — spending, mobile wallets, ATM access — and its self-custody model removes a category of risk that most competitors still carry. The mark holds it back because of the transparency gaps and a few fees that bite if you use the card the wrong way.

Who it suits: people who already hold USDC, understand that they are their own bank, and want a card that spends it without an exchange in the middle. Who it does not suit: people who want a bank with a phone number, a regulation complaint route, or a country list they can read before signing up.

The nine out of ten for everyday use is not a rounding error — it is the strongest thing about this card. Most crypto cards are virtual-only, work in one wallet, or have no ATM at all. Banqa has a physical Visa Infinite, both mobile wallets, and ATM access. If your day includes tapping a phone at a shop or taking money out, this part of the card is ready.

Who will they give you the card

Short answer: the card’s public pages do not publish a country list. Eligibility is said to depend on residence and applicable rules, and is confirmed during the application and KYC process. A supported-countries page is linked but was not read for this review, so I cannot tell you the list. That is the honest state of it.

This matters more for this card than for a normal bank card, because the answer is not only about where you live. Sanctions screening and issuer risk policy are frequently applied to citizenship and country of birth as well as to your country of address. So a reader who has, say, one nationality and lives in another country should not assume the residence answer settles the question.

The practical upshot: you can find out whether you are eligible only by applying and passing the checks. There is no published shortlist to check yourself against first. If living in a grey area — and for many readers of a crypto card review that is exactly the situation — the honest advice is to expect a possible no, and to have a second card in mind. I get to that below.

How to get it

Applying is a standard identity check: a government ID — passport, national ID or driver’s licence — plus proof of address dated within the last 3 months. Higher tiers may ask for source-of-funds documents, which is the usual “where did this money come from” paperwork.

Automated checks usually clear in minutes. Manual reviews take 24 to 48 hours. If a check fails, you can retry from the dashboard. The minimum age is not stated on the pages I looked at.

What you end up with is a Visa Infinite card, virtual and physical. Business customers get virtual and physical as well. The card currency is USD, so anything you buy in another currency carries an FX fee. The physical card issuance and shipping costs $39.00; which countries it ships to, and how long it takes, are not stated.

One thing that catches people out: your daily, weekly and monthly limits depend on your verification tier, and the tier names and amounts are not published. The card refers to a “Standard tier” with no annual fee, but the other tiers and what they add are not described. So you cannot, from the public pages, budget around a specific monthly ceiling. Per-transaction limits, at least, you can set yourself.

Fees and what a payment actually costs

The headline is friendly: no annual fee on the Standard tier. Then come the numbers that decide whether a payment is cheap or not. Here is the full published schedule.

Now let me walk three everyday payments through it, because the fee only tells you half the story. You need to know what the card does with the money on the way to the merchant.

A coffee in your own country, paid in dollars. The card is USD-based, so there is no FX fee and no conversion fee — USDC is spent against collateral. What you may pay is the fixed ATM-style or balance-check fees only if you use those features, not for a normal purchase. This is the cheapest case, and for most people in a dollar country it is the everyday case.

A coffee in a country that uses euros or pounds. Now the 1.99% FX fee applies on top. On a $5 purchase that is roughly ten cents — noticeable on a large bill, easy to ignore on a small one. This is the fee that separates a crypto card from a normal travel card, and it is the main reason to check the currency of whatever you are buying before you tap.

Cash from an ATM. Here the two ATM fees can apply together, depending on the withdrawal: a fixed $1.50 per withdrawal, and for end users a percentage of 1% plus $1. Limits follow Visa partner standards, and the free allowance is not stated. So the cost of taking out $100 is not just the amount — it is the amount plus whatever combination of those fees the withdrawal attracts. If you use ATMs often, add this to your running total before you commit to the card.

The card also discloses that chargeback handling is a fee in its schedule. The process and time frames are not described, so I would not plan around it as a safety net.

How to top up

Top up means sending USDC to the card’s own smart-contract wallet, which you control — a self-custody setup, not a balance held at Banqa. The site says to hold USDC on Base and Arbitrum, and to send only USDC on Base.

The good news on cost: “Zero deposit fees,” and no fee on USDC top-ups. Other assets and networks cost from free to 1% depending on the route, according to the fee page. The minimum top-up is not stated.

Getting money back out works the other way: the withdraw page moves USDC from the card’s collateral to your self-custody wallet via an on-chain authorisation. An offramp example fee on the home page is “1% + $3.00.” Closing the account costs $10.00.

Two things to keep in mind when you read that list. First, on-chain transfers are irreversible, and the network charges its own fee — gas on Ethereum, bandwidth and energy on Tron — separately from anything the card does. Second, sending to the wrong network or a mismatched address can mean the funds are simply gone, or need manual support recovery with no guarantee. Match the network every time. The card is specific about which chains it wants; the wrong one is not recoverable by optimism.

Paying with it every day

Day-to-day, this card behaves like a normal Visa. Apple Pay and Google Pay are supported on the official page. You get both a virtual and a physical Visa Infinite. Cash is available at ATMs, at the fees listed above. Your balance and card details live in a web/app dashboard. The specific platforms and store ratings are not stated.

What you do not get, in the way rewards: no cashback is stated. There is a referral programme that pays 0.15% of friends’ spend and a $10 bonus per friend who reaches $500 in spend — fine as a footnote, not a reason to pick a card. Whether any merchant categories are blocked is not stated, which is a fair question for a crypto card and one I would want answered.

One everyday mechanic worth understanding, because it explains the occasional surprise decline. Card numbers start with an issuer identification number of 6 or 8 digits that tells the merchant which institution and country issued the card. Shops can look that up, and some apply extra scrutiny — or decline the card outright — when the issuer country differs from your billing address, or when the card is prepaid or foreign. That is a category-wide behaviour, not a Banqa quirk, and it is one reason the country question in the section above is not academic.

What can go wrong

Let me take the risks in order of how likely they are to affect you.

Losing your keys, or sending to the wrong place. This is the price of self-custody, and it is the one risk that is genuinely yours. Your recovery phrase is shown once and is not recoverable by Banqa. Anyone who gets it can restore the wallet and spend the funds, and the network cannot freeze or return them. Clipboard-hijacking malware that swaps a copied address is a real and quiet threat.

Being outside the supported countries. You may simply be refused. Since the list is not published, this is the risk you cannot price in advance.

A de-pegged stablecoin. USDC is dollar-pegged and Circle says it is fully backed and redeemable 1:1, with monthly reserve attestations — but stablecoins are not necessarily stable, and USDC lost its peg briefly in March 2023. Your card spends USDC, so its value is tied to that peg.

The provider disappearing or being cut off. Banqa is a brand of Codego Group, and the cards are issued by a Visa Principal Member under a licence from Visa; Banqa states it is not a bank, and the issuer’s name and licences are not named on the pages I read. Networks can suspend programmes — Visa ended its global agreements with FTX in November 2022, and WaveCrest’s Visa programmes were suspended in 2018 — and closures typically mean a notice period, then spending stops, then you withdraw what is left. There is a 2026 closure reported by a secondary source where new loads ended 8 July 2026 and spending stopped 8 August 2026; that is a single unconfirmed report, but it shows the shape of the risk.

A declined authorisation holding your funds. A failed payment can leave a hold for several days, sometimes up to 7.

Tax. I am not giving tax advice, and you should check your own position, but one thing is worth knowing: digital assets are generally treated as property, so spending crypto on goods or services produces a taxable gain or loss measured in local currency at the value on the date of the transaction. Each card payment funded from crypto can be a separate disposal. That is a bookkeeping question, not a card feature, and it is yours to resolve.

On the reassuring side: the security controls are real. There is instant card freeze in the app, card details shown for 60 seconds, email OTP or Google 2FA with passkeys rolling out, and Codego runs penetration tests and operates under SOC 2 controls. Support is by email, replying usually within 24 hours. On complaints, the honest picture is thin: Trustpilot shows 3.7 from a single review, a 5-star review from July 2026, and notes that the company has not invited reviews. One review is not a track record in either direction — but it does mean you have almost no public history to lean on.

What to take instead

If any of the above is a dealbreaker for you, the alternatives are worth a look. I have pulled the comparable facts together so you can weigh them side by side.

A few contrasts worth naming. BloFin is cheaper to hold — every listed fee is $0.00 — but its spend fee of 1% or lower is charged at payment, so you pay per transaction instead of per year, and its country list is equally unpublished on the card page. Decaf has the cleanest FX story, adding no fee of its own on top of Visa’s rate, and it publishes a long restricted list of countries — though whether that applies by citizenship or residence is not stated. SafePal, meanwhile, is the one that publishes a region page, though it was empty when I fetched it.

None of these is a clean win over Banqa; they are different bets. Banqa’s bet is self-custody plus a fully fledged physical Visa. If that combination is what you were looking for, the alternatives will not beat it on those two points.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend Banqa to a specific person: someone who already holds USDC, keeps it in their own wallet, and wants to spend it through a proper Visa — physical card, both mobile wallets, ATM — without handing the keys to a platform. If that is you, the card does its job, the everyday-use mark of 9 out of 10 is earned, and the fee schedule is fair enough for daily use.

I would not recommend it, without hesitation, to three kinds of reader. If you want a bank, with the regulation, a phone number, and a complaints process you can actually use, Banqa says plainly that it is not a bank — this is the wrong tool. If you cannot get an ordinary card in your country or situation and you need certainty about eligibility before you commit, the unpublished country list makes this a gamble. And if you are the kind of person who loses a recovery phrase once and expects someone to sort it out, self-custody will teach you a hard lesson; the phrase is shown once and not recoverable.

If you fall between those — you want the card but you have one specific worry — the cost of finding out is a $39.00 physical card and an application. For most readers in your position that is a reasonable price for the answer.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Banqa card?

Banqa is a Visa Infinite payment card, available as both virtual and physical, that spends USDC you hold in your own self-custody wallet rather than a balance held at a platform. It supports Apple Pay and Google Pay, works as a USD-based card, and offers ATM withdrawals. Banqa is a brand of Codego Group and states it is not a bank.

How does the Banqa card work?

You send USDC to the card’s own smart-contract wallet on Base, Arbitrum or Ethereum, and it becomes collateral against your card balance. When you pay, the USDC is spent directly against that collateral, with no manual conversion step. The card currency is USD. Getting money back out moves USDC from the card collateral to your self-custody wallet via an on-chain authorisation.

Is Banqa a bank?

No. Banqa states it is not a bank. It is a brand of Codego Group, and the cards are issued by a Visa Principal Member under a licence from Visa. The issuer’s name and its licences are not named on the pages I reviewed. If you want a regulated bank account, this is not it.

Who owns Banqa?

Banqa is a brand of Codego Group (CODEGO GROUP LTD). The company runs penetration tests and operates under SOC 2 controls. It does not invite reviews on Trustpilot, where the card shows a 3.7 rating from a single review.

Which countries is Banqa available in?

The card does not publish a country list. Eligibility is said to depend on residence and applicable rules and is confirmed during the application and KYC process. Because citizenship and country of birth are also screened for sanctions and issuer risk, residence alone may not settle it. The only reliable way to know is to apply.

How do I get a Banqa card?

You apply with a government ID — passport, national ID or driver’s licence — plus proof of address dated within the last 3 months. Higher tiers may require source-of-funds documents. Automated checks usually take minutes; manual reviews take 24 to 48 hours. If a check fails you can retry from the dashboard. The physical card costs $39.00 including shipping; delivery countries and time are not stated.

Does Banqa require KYC?

Yes. KYC is part of the application: identity document and proof of address are the baseline, and higher tiers add source-of-funds documents. Daily, weekly and monthly limits then depend on your verification tier, though the tier names and amounts are not published. Failed checks can be retried from the dashboard rather than starting over.

How do I top up the Banqa card?

You send USDC to the card’s self-custody smart-contract wallet on Base, Arbitrum or Ethereum. The site says to hold USDC on Base and Arbitrum and to send only USDC on Base. USDC top-ups carry no fee; other assets and networks cost from free to 1% depending on route. Transfers are irreversible, so sending on an unsupported network or to a mismatched address can lose the funds.

How much does the Banqa card cost to use?

The Standard tier has no annual fee. The physical card is $39.00 including shipping. Spending USDC in a non-USD currency carries a 1.99% FX fee. ATM withdrawals cost a fixed $1.50 each, plus for end users 1% of the amount plus $1, with a $0.60 balance or authorisation check. Monthly fee, ATM free allowance and tier benefits are not stated.

Is the Banqa card safe?

The card’s security controls are solid: self-custody wallet, instant card freeze in the app, card details shown for 60 seconds, email OTP or Google 2FA, passkeys rolling out, SOC 2 controls and penetration testing. The trade-off is that your recovery phrase is shown once and is not recoverable by Banqa. Crypto transfers are irreversible, so a stolen key or a swapped address cannot be reversed by anyone.

Content created by the «cryptocardselect» team