Offshore Visa Cards - How do they work?
September 18th, 2007An offshore visa account is an extremely convenient way to keep your money both safe and accessible.
But, if you’re convinced that an offshore credit card is for you, there are some things you need to understand to make sure that you get the product that you expect and the level of service that you are looking for.
The first thing to understand?
Offshore Visa Cards typically work differently than regular Credit Cards
How so? Didn’t I just get done expousing the convenient benefits of owning an offshore credit card? How they are part of the Visa network and gave you access to your funds at millions of merchants and cash machines worldwide?
Yes, that is all true. However, they differ in that they typically aren’t actually credit cards. Offshore bankers long had a big problem in issuing an offshore visa card. Primarily, how could they go about cost-effectively verifying the credit worthiness of customer in over 100 different countries?
Offshore banking institutions got around this problem by issuing pre-paid offshore visa cards. Pre-paid offshore credit cards, get around the challenge of verifying the credit worthiness of clients in dozens of jurisdictions, while giving the client what they want; easy affordable access to their funds held offshore.
A pre-paid credit card, to any merchant who accepts Visa, will function exactly like a regular domestic Visa card. The user, however, will “pre-load” the offshore credt card with funds he or she wishes to spend from their offshore bank account. The card works similarly to an offshore debit card, however, the user gets the added protection of not having all of their offshore banking funds tied to a singular card in case it is lost or stolen. In this case, a larger amount of money can be held in the client’s offshore banking account and the client can charge the card conveniently, online, for the smaller amount of funds he or she needs immediate access to.
That, in a nutshell, is how an offshore visa account works, and why so many people find the idea of an offshore visa account so attractive