Banqa review: no annual fee, real Visa Infinite, and you keep your own keys

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Banqa is not a bank, not an exchange and not a wallet in the usual custodial sense. It is a brand of Codego Group, and what it offers is a Visa Infinite card — virtual and physical — that spends USDC you already hold in your own self-custody smart-contract wallet on Base, Arbitrum or Ethereum. You keep the keys; the card draws against collateral you have moved into it. No annual fee on the Standard tier, a 1.99% fee when you spend in something other than US dollars, and $39.00 for a physical card with shipping. That is the shape of the product. Everything below is what I found when I read the terms, the fee schedule and the small print, set out so you can decide whether it fits your situation before you spend anything.

Conditions are current as of October 28, 2026

Verdict: 7.1 out of 10

Banqa scores 7.1 out of 10. That is a good card for a narrow and specific person, and a mediocre one for everybody else. If you already hold USDC, if you keep your own keys and are comfortable choosing a network and copying an address correctly, this is one of the more straightforward crypto cards around: no annual fee, a real Visa Infinite, Apple Pay and Google Pay, and spending that does not depend on a conversion step you have to trigger yourself. If you are looking for an ordinary replacement for a bank card you cannot open, the picture is less comfortable — and the reason is not the fees. It is that the card’s public pages do not publish the country list, the tier limits, or the monthly fee.

The audience note is short and worth repeating: this card is built for people who hold USDC and keep their own keys. If that sentence is you, read on and you will find little to argue with. If it is not you — if you are here because your bank will not open an account for you, or because you want a card that simply works everywhere — then the missing country list is the first thing to weigh, and it may end up being the last thing you need.

Will they give you the card?

There is no published list of countries. Banqa states that eligibility depends on residence and applicable rules, and that this is confirmed during the application and the KYC checks. A supported-countries page is linked from the site, but the answer is not on the card’s own pages before you start: not stated.

That is the honest position, and it is worth understanding why it matters rather than filing it as a technicality. Country and citizenship rules are described here as the card states them, in general terms, because there is nothing more specific to tell you. If you live somewhere the rules exclude you, an application will fail at the verification stage, and you will find out after uploading your documents rather than before.

The same candour applies to verification tiers. Daily, weekly and monthly limits depend on your verification tier, and the amounts behind those tiers are not stated — Banqa names a “Standard tier” with no annual fee but does not publish the tier structure or what attaches to it. Per-transaction limits you can set yourself. So the practical position is: your ceiling is not knowable in advance, and it will rise, or not, depending on how the checks go.

What Banqa does say about who can apply is thin in one more direction — age is not stated. Category-wide, prepaid and debit cards are generally available to adults from 18, and some issuers set higher minimums of their own, but that is a general rule about cards, not a Banqa rule. Treat the absence as an open question rather than as permission.

How to get it

The application is a document upload, not an interview. You need a government ID — passport, national ID card or driver’s licence — and proof of address dated within the last three months. Higher tiers may also ask for source-of-funds documents, which is the tedious part people remember and also the part that determines your limits.

The checks themselves are fast in the good case. Automated checks usually finish within minutes; a manual review takes 24 to 48 hours. If a check fails you can retry it from the dashboard, so a first refusal is not the end of the road. Age is not stated.

What comes out the other end is a Visa Infinite card, virtual or physical. Business customers get both virtual and physical. The card currency is USD, which is the quiet reason the FX fee keeps coming up in this review: any transaction in another currency is not a neutral event.

Physical card issuance and shipping costs $39.00. Where it ships and how long it takes is not stated, and that is a real gap for anyone outside the obvious markets — you are asked to pay before you know the wait.

Fees: what it really costs

The headline is genuinely good and worth saying before the caveats: there is no annual fee on the Standard tier. Other tiers exist and their benefits are not stated. There is no conversion fee in the sense of a spread you trigger yourself, because USDC is spent against collateral rather than manually converted. What there *is*, is a currency fee, an ATM fee, and a handful of smaller charges that are easy to miss.

Three everyday payments, and what each costs you:

• Coffee in your own country, card pays in USD. No FX fee, no conversion fee. This is the case Banqa is built for and it is clean.
• A subscription billed in euros. 1.99% on top of whatever rate Visa applies. On a $20 monthly charge that is a recurring number — the kind that quietly decides whether a card suits paying for services in other currencies.
• Withdrawing cash. Either $1.50 fixed, or 1% of the amount plus $1, plus a $0.60 balance or authorisation check. Note that the fixed and percentage structures sit side by side in the fee schedule rather than one clearly replacing the other; which applies to your withdrawal is worth confirming before you rely on it, and the limits follow Visa partner standards with no free allowance stated.

Chargeback handling is itself a disclosed line in the fee schedule. The process and the time frames are not described, which matters more than the fee: a refund you cannot navigate is worth very little.

How to top up the card

Topping up is where Banqa differs most from its competitors, and it is the part worth reading twice. USDC sits in a self-custody smart-contract wallet on Base, Arbitrum or Ethereum — the site says “Hold USDC on Base and Arbitrum” and “Send only USDC on Base”. The USDC top-up itself is free; other assets and networks cost from nothing to 1% depending on the route. The minimum is not stated.

The mechanics, then: you already hold USDC, you send it on a supported network to a smart-contract wallet you control, and the card draws against that collateral. There is no step where you convert into a fiat balance first, and no step where a provider custodies your money between you and the card.

Moving back the other way, the withdraw page moves USDC from the card collateral into your self-custody wallet through an on-chain authorisation. The example offramp fee on the home page is “1% + $3.00”, and closing the account costs $10.00 once.

Two practical notes, without me editorialising about how you should handle them. Network choice matters: Circle stopped supporting USDC on Tron in February 2024, so “USDC over TRC20” is not a native option here, and a transfer sent on a network the provider does not support, or to an address belonging to another network, can be lost or need manual support recovery with no guarantee. And ERC-20 gas is paid in ETH — a wallet holding USDT but no ETH cannot send it at all, so on Ethereum specifically you need a little ETH alongside your USDC; Arbitrum and Base have their own gas arrangements.

Paying with it every day

This is the card’s strongest section, and the 9 out of 10 is earned rather than given.

• Visa Infinite, virtual and physical, USD-denominated.
• Apple Pay and Google Pay, both supported on the official pages. The tokenised number stays on your device and each payment carries a one-time code, which is a better posture than handing over the card number.
• ATM access, at the fees listed above.
• A web and app dashboard, with platforms and store ratings not stated.

What is missing: blocked merchant categories are not stated. That is not a small omission. In this category issuers routinely block whole merchant category codes — 7995, gambling, is the one you will meet most often — and the list varies by issuer. Whether Banqa lets you pay in casinos, betting shops or crypto-adjacent merchants, and whether a given shop will accept the card at all, is not something the public pages tell you.

On rewards there is nothing encouraging. No cashback is stated. There is a referral programme paying 0.15% of friends’ spend and a $10 bonus when a friend reaches $500 of spend — a modest structure, and worth reading as what it is.

Expect some declines. A merchant can look up the card’s BIN and see which institution and country issued it, and apply extra scrutiny when that differs from the billing address; some merchants decline prepaid or foreign BINs for exactly that reason. Address verification is also weak on foreign-issued cards, which produces declines that look inexplicable from your side. And a declined authorisation can leave a hold on your funds for several days, typically up to 7 — worth knowing before you assume a failed payment cost you nothing.

What can go wrong

Starting with the company, because this is where the real questions sit. Banqa is a brand of Codego Group. Cards are issued by a Visa Principal Member pursuant to a licence from Visa. Banqa states plainly that it is not a bank. The issuer’s name and its licences are not named on the public pages. That is not automatically a red flag — a crypto brand is often only a programme manager or front end over someone else’s licence — but it does mean that when something goes wrong, you may be dealing with a party you cannot identify from the marketing site.

Security runs through self-custody, which cuts both ways. You hold the private key, so no custodian can lose it; but the recovery phrase is shown once and Banqa cannot recover it for you, and a seed phrase is 12 to 24 words that anyone who obtains them can use to restore the wallet and spend from it. Blockchain transfers are irreversible, so a stolen key has no built-in recovery. The app offers instant card freeze, shows card details for 60 seconds, supports email OTP or Google 2FA, and is rolling out passkeys. Codego runs penetration tests and operates under SOC 2 controls. Support is by email, with replies usually within 24 hours.

On complaints there is almost nothing to go on: Trustpilot shows 3.7 with a single 5-star review from July 2026, and Trustpilot notes the company has not invited reviews. One review of a live product is not a track record in either direction. If you are risk-averse, this is the card’s real blind spot — not because anything bad is visible, but because there is not enough history to look at.

Finally, the category risks that are nobody’s fault but land on you anyway. A programme can be wound down: Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022, and WaveCrest’s Visa programmes closed entirely after a European suspension in 2018. Closures typically mean a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then you are asked to withdraw what remains. In the EU, MiCA’s transitional period for providers operating under national law runs only until 1 July 2026 or until a MiCA authorisation is granted or refused, whichever comes first — so the regulatory footing under a card can shift even while the card keeps working. And stablecoins depeg: TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022, USDC lost its peg briefly in March 2023. If your balance is USDC, that risk is yours in a way it would not be with a bank deposit.

What to take instead

Four cards side by side, on the same scoring basis.

Three points from that table deserve a second look.

Decaf has the clearest map. It publishes an explicit restricted list — Belarus, China, North Korea (DPRK), India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Cuba, Ukraine, Venezuela, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Nigeria — and names restricted US states: Arizona, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Maryland, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, Wisconsin. Russia and Belarus both appear; whether the rule runs on citizenship or on residence is not stated. If your reason for reading about crypto cards is that geography is in the way, that list is worth more than any of Banqa’s numbers.

BloFin is the cheaper-looking option, with a catch. Four of its fees are $0.00, and its spend fee falls from 1.00% at VIP 0 to 0.00% at VIP 5 — but those tiers are earned, and the starting data lists 35 countries including the US, Australia, Japan, the UAE, Brazil, Mexico, Malaysia and New Zealand, with citizenship versus residence not stated. There is no cashback; the lower spend rate is the reward.

SafePal is the quiet one. No cashback, referral commissions of up to 40% of referred top-up fees, and tier privileges tied to deposits, referrals and SFP staking. Its own regions page was empty when it was fetched, which is its version of Banqa’s missing country list. Note also that its limits are given in EUR against a Swiss Fiat24 account — a different shape entirely from a USD card.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend Banqa to you if all four of these are true: you already hold USDC; you are comfortable being your own custodian, keys and all; most of what you buy is priced in dollars, so the 1.99% FX fee rarely bites; and you can wait out a KYC review of up to 48 hours and a physical card whose shipping time nobody publishes.

I would point you elsewhere if the question you arrived with was “is Banqa available in my country” or “is Banqa safe” — both go unanswered by the public pages, and unanswered questions are what I am left holding as a reviewer. If you need a card for receiving payments in a restricted country, Decaf’s published list is the more honest starting point. If you want zero card fees and will climb a VIP ladder, look at BloFin. If you want a EUR card fed from a wide range of chains, consider SafePal.

One caution applies to all of them, and I would rather say it than leave it out. The IRS treats digital assets as property, so exchanging them for goods, services or dollars generally produces a taxable gain or loss, measured in local currency at the fair market value on the date of the transaction. Each card payment funded from crypto can be a separate disposal. That is not tax advice — it is a note that the bookkeeping exists and no card does it for you. Treatment elsewhere varies, and a local professional beats a card’s help page every time.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Banqa card?

Banqa is a Visa Infinite payment card, virtual and physical, that spends USDC you hold in your own self-custody smart-contract wallet rather than a bank balance. It is a brand of Codego Group, it states it is not a bank, and the cards are issued by a Visa Principal Member under a Visa licence. There is no annual fee on the Standard tier, and a physical card costs $39.00 including shipping.

Is Banqa a bank?

No — Banqa says so itself. It is a card brand and programme front end. The cards are issued by a Visa Principal Member pursuant to a licence from Visa, which is a normal arrangement in this category, but the issuer’s own name and licences are not named on Banqa’s public pages. Practically, what you hold is not a bank deposit and should not be read as deposit-guaranteed money.

How does the Banqa card work?

You send USDC to a smart-contract wallet you control on Base, Arbitrum or Ethereum, and the card spends against that collateral — the site describes “no manual conversion”. When you pay, the balance in that wallet covers it. Money moving back to your wallet uses an on-chain authorisation, with an example offramp fee of 1% + $3.00.

Does the Banqa card require KYC?

Yes. You need a government ID — passport, national ID or driver’s licence — plus proof of address dated within three months; higher tiers may also ask for source-of-funds documents. Automated checks usually take minutes and manual reviews run 24 to 48 hours, and a failed check can be retried from the dashboard. Daily, weekly and monthly limits depend on your verification tier.

How much does the Banqa card cost?

No annual fee on the Standard tier, and no conversion fee since USDC is spent against collateral. What you pay for is the physical card at $39.00 with shipping, 1.99% FX on non-USD transactions, ATM withdrawals at $1.50 fixed or 1% plus $1, a $0.60 balance or authorisation check, $3.00 account residency and $5.00 corporate issuing. A monthly fee may exist but is not stated.

Is the Banqa card free?

In the ways that matter most, yes: no annual fee on the Standard tier, no fee on USDC top-ups, and no manual conversion fee. It is not free in every sense — the physical card is $39.00, foreign-currency spending costs 1.99%, and cash withdrawals cost. Other tiers exist beyond Standard and their benefits are not stated, so “free” applies to the one tier you can actually see.

Where can I use the Banqa card?

Anywhere Visa Infinite is accepted, including online, in stores, at compatible ATMs, and through Apple Pay and Google Pay. Two caveats: blocked merchant categories are not stated, so you cannot check from the site whether gambling or similar merchants are closed to the card; and some shops decline prepaid or foreign BINs after looking up the issuing country.

How do I top up the Banqa card?

Send USDC to the smart-contract wallet on Base, Arbitrum or Ethereum — the site says “Hold USDC on Base and Arbitrum” and “Send only USDC on Base”. USDC deposits carry zero deposit fees; other assets and networks cost from free to 1% depending on the route. The minimum is not stated. Note that USDC on Tron is not a native option, and that on Ethereum you need a little ETH for gas.

Is the Banqa card safe?

It is a self-custody setup, which means no custodian can lose your funds but you carry the full risk of key loss and phishing — the recovery phrase is shown once and Banqa cannot recover it. The app has instant card freeze, card details visible for 60 seconds, email OTP or Google 2FA, and passkeys rolling out, and Codego runs penetration tests under SOC 2 controls. On track record there is very little: Trustpilot shows 3.7 from a single review.

How do I withdraw money and close the account?

You move USDC from the card collateral back to your self-custody wallet through an on-chain authorisation; the example offramp fee on the home page is 1% + $3.00. Closing the account costs $10.00 one-time. Because the money sits in a wallet you control, withdrawal is a network transfer rather than a request to a provider — but blockchain transfers are irreversible, so a wrong network or address is not recoverable.

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