The card that spends USDC as dollars, built for Colombia

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

If you have been searching for a way to spend crypto without giving up the convenience of an ordinary card, VIIO is one of the names that keeps coming up. It is a dollar-denominated Visa card funded from a stablecoin balance, offered by Persimon S.A.S. under the VIIO name, and the contract is governed by Colombian law. That combination is unusual: most crypto cards in this category either chase a global audience with no local anchor, or sit inside one country’s payment system with crypto bolted on. VIIO is the second kind.

My verdict, after reading the card’s own pages and terms: 6.6 out of 10. Not a bad score — but not the score of a card that has clearly told the world everything it needs to. The strengths are real and, in places, unusually good: the virtual card is free, there is no monthly fee, and everyday spending works the way you would expect. The weaknesses are all about silence rather than cost. The list of countries where the card is issued is not published. The conversion fee is not itemised. The fee for a crypto top-up is not named. You can read all of the good news on the public pages; the bad news is mostly the absence of news.

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

Who this suits: someone living in Colombia who wants to hold and spend US dollars without a dollar bank account — particularly someone paid in crypto, or with savings in USDC who wants ordinary spending behaviour. Who it does not suit: anyone outside Colombia hoping the card simply works, anyone who needs to know the exact FX cost before they tap, and anyone who plans to run their finances through a service that does not name its issuing bank.

Who will they actually give the card to?

Here is the honest answer: the card’s own public pages do not tell you. The eligibility country list is not stated in the terms. What you do get is the sense of direction. The contract is under Colombian law, the product is aimed at Colombia, the card page advertises merchants in “200+ countries”, and the help centre points you at a Colombian bank or PSE top-up and at a question about using a passport without a Colombian ID — though I did not read the answer to that one.

So we have two different “200+ countries” and it is worth keeping them apart in your head. One is about where the card works. The other is about who can hold it. They are not the same thing, and the marketing tends to blur them.

What is actually established about the person who applies:

• You confirm you are of legal age.
• You supply the information the app requests, and update it at least once a year.
• You consent to credit bureau checks.

That is the whole identity picture on the public pages. The document list is not stated, nor is any KYC tier structure — there is no published table of limits that rises with your verification level. If you are somewhere the service does not operate, that is the first thing to establish before anything else, and the only reliable way is to install the app and see whether it accepts your details. I know that is an unsatisfying answer. It is still the accurate one.

One practical note for anyone reading this outside Colombia: the card draws on a “Digital USD balance”, which is a dollar-denominated store of value rather than a bank account. Credit on the card is capped at the value of digital assets held in the account. That is the trade you are making — a dollar card that cannot overdraw you — and it is a sane trade, but it means this is closer to a prepaid card than to the bank card you may have lost access to.

How to get it

The application itself is not the hard part, and there is nothing exotic in the sequence. Three things are worth knowing before you start.

First, the virtual card is free once you have topped up your account with at least 3 USD. That is the entry point: a few dollars in, a card number out.

Second, the physical card requires a 50 USD balance. The help centre also lists a 5 USD charge in connection with the physical card when the balance is under that threshold — so the practical reading is that the plastic is currently free but the low-balance case has a price tag attached. The card terms are explicit that fees may be reinstated. Treat today’s zero as a current state, not a permanent one.

Third, the card arrives deactivated. Activation happens in the app. So does freezing, cancelling and everything else.

You get two cards, not one:

• A virtual card with a dynamic CVV — the security code changes, which makes a screenshot of the card details considerably less useful to a thief.
• A physical card, contactless, for tap-to-pay.

Both are Visa, both spend from the Digital USD balance.

On replacements, the asymmetry is worth noting: a replacement physical card costs 5 USD, while reissuing a virtual card costs 0 USD — and both are free if the card is defective or if a disputed charge is resolved in your favour. That reads like a card company that expects virtual reissues to be routine and physical ones to be the expensive case.

What nobody tells you: delivery countries, delivery time and delivery cost for the physical card are not stated. If the plastic is the reason you want this, that gap matters. Ask support directly before you commit.

What it really costs: Fees and limits

This is the strongest part of the card and also the most frustrating, because the number you most want — the conversion fee — is the one that is missing. The card’s own words are that purchases “Depend on the VISA type and exchange rate”, that you can “Pay in any currency, VIIO handles the conversion”, and, in the terms, that “The Card currently does not charge any fee.”

Read those three sentences carefully and notice what they do. The first two describe the Visa rate as the mechanism. The third says VIIO itself charges no fee today. Those can both be true at once, and the gap between them — the spread Visa applies, plus whatever the network and the ATM take — is exactly what the card does not quantify. If your spending is in dollars, this is close to a zero-cost card. If your spending is in pesos or euros, you are paying a rate whose size you cannot learn from the card’s pages.

Now three everyday payments, so the table stops being abstract.

A 20 USD subscription in dollars. You pay 20 USD from the Digital USD balance. VIIO charges no fee on this by its own terms. No conversion is involved because the balance and the charge are the same currency. This is the clean case, and it is why the card scores 8 out of 10 on cost.

The same subscription paid from pesos, worth roughly 80 000 COP. VIIO converts at the Visa rate; the card describes the conversion as handled for you and gives no percentage. Assume you are paying the Visa spread and check what your own statement actually shows, because the card will not tell you in advance.

Withdrawing 50 USD at a cash machine abroad. The card says you can withdraw local cash at any Visa ATM worldwide, and that the fee “Depend on the ATM operator”. VIIO’s own fee is not listed, and there is no stated free allowance — so an ATM abroad should be assumed to be a charge, not a free operation.

Two more things that are true but unwritten. The withdrawal list is broad — COP, USD, CAD, AUD, EUR, GBP, MXN — and withdrawals are “No cost (currently exempt)” for those currencies, though that exemption carries the same “currently” caveat as the rest. And a declined payment can leave a hold on your money for several days, which is standard card-network behaviour and not VIIO’s design, but it is worth knowing before you plan a tight week around a large purchase.

How to top the card up

The balance runs on USDC and USDT, and there are three routes in: PSE, bank transfer, and crypto. The route you pick depends less on what you want to pay with than on what you want to pay with it in.

PSE, in Colombian pesos. No cost (currently exempt). PSE is the Colombian real-time payment scheme, so this is a local rail for local money.

Bank transfer, in Colombian pesos. No VIIO cost; your bank may charge. That distinction is worth holding onto — the “free” here is free on their side, not necessarily on yours.

Crypto, by wallet address or QR code. The card receives USDC and USDT. Here the card’s pages go quiet on two points that matter more than anything else in a crypto top-up: the supported networks are not disclosed, and the fee charged for a crypto top-up is not stated. Send on the wrong network and you may be looking at a support ticket rather than a balance.

This last point deserves more than a line, because it is the single most common way people lose money in this category. A blockchain transfer is irreversible. If you send USDT over a network the card does not support, or to an address belonging to a different network, the funds can simply be gone, or recoverable only through a manual support process with no guarantee. And the two most common networks for tether are not the same thing: USDT exists on Ethereum, Tron, Solana, Polygon, Avalanche and others, while Circle stopped supporting USDC on Tron in February 2024 — so “USDC over TRC20” is not a native option. Before your first transfer, confirm the network in the app, not from memory.

Thresholds, briefly: the virtual card needs a minimum top-up of 3 USD; the physical card needs 50 USD. And if you ever leave, withdrawals are “No cost (currently exempt)” in the seven listed currencies, and a transfer out to a crypto wallet costs the network fee only, with none charged by VIIO. What happens to a remaining balance at closure is not addressed anywhere I could find.

Paying with it every day

For ordinary spending the card behaves properly. It is Visa, so the acceptance surface is the whole network rather than a shortlist of partner merchants. The physical card is contactless. The virtual card has a dynamic CVV, so the three digits on the back change — which is the single most useful anti-fraud feature on a virtual card, because a stolen screenshot of the number is not enough on its own.

Mobile wallets. The virtual card can be added to Apple Pay, and how that works under the hood is worth a sentence, because it is the reason phone payments are safer than card payments: Apple Pay replaces the card number with a device-specific number kept in the phone’s Secure Element, never on Apple’s servers, and each payment carries a one-time security code. Google Pay is not disclosed. If you are on Android, that is an open question, and one to ask before you plan on tapping your phone in a shop.

Rewards. Not stated. If someone tells you VIIO pays cashback, ask where they read it.

Blocked categories. Not stated. That cuts both ways: no list of casinos and gambling merchants is published (such blocks are issuer policy, not law), and equally no list of the ordinary shops someone might be surprised to find declined.

In the app. iOS only, as far as what I could read: 4.0 out of 5 from 12 ratings in the Colombian App Store, read 2026-10-21. Twelve ratings is not a body of evidence; it is a snapshot of how a small user base has felt. The Google Play rating was not readable because the page was truncated.

Disputes. This is unusually specific and worth noting favourably. If you need to ask for a reversal — fraud, an unauthorised purchase, goods not delivered, defective goods — you must file within five business days of becoming aware of the problem. Claims are handled under Article 51 of the Colombian Consumer Protection Statute. Five business days is a short window and it is yours to protect: the clock starts when you know, not when you notice.

What can go wrong

Start with the biggest thing the card does not tell you: the issuing bank is not named on the pages I read. That matters more than it sounds. When you hold a card, several parties are involved — the network (Visa) routes the transactions and sets the rules; the issuer is the licensed bank or e-money institution that actually holds the card programme; the brand in front of you is often only the programme manager, the app and the marketing. VIIO’s footer says it “does not provide or offer regulated financial services”, and its terms say it “does not collect public funds”. Read those two lines together with the missing issuer name and you get a clear picture of what VIIO is: a front end on top of someone else’s balance. That can be perfectly normal and well-regulated. But it means the entity you would complain to about a lost payment may not be the entity that holds your funds, and you cannot tell which is which from these pages.

Reputation, so far, is clean and quiet. I found no official incidents involving the card, and no Trustpilot or Reddit reviews surfaced in the complaints search. That is not the same as a good track record — it is closer to a young one. Press coverage from La Republica in January 2025 described a launch with Visa and Dock. Reports about additions for Venezuela and Portugal were not confirmed on the pages I read, so I would not plan around them. For context on how this category behaves under stress: Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022 and the FTX US debit card was wound down; WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied several crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all its Visa programmes. Programmes like that typically give notice, then stop spending and loading, then ask users to withdraw. Check what happens to your balance before you need to.

Custody. Not stated. The terms say VIIO does not receive or manage user money, but whether the crypto itself sits in a wallet you control or one the provider controls is not spelled out on the pages I read. That is not a technicality. Control of crypto belongs to whoever holds the private key or the seed phrase — typically 12 to 24 words in an unencrypted form, which anyone who obtains can use to restore the wallet and spend from it. Transfers are irreversible and a stolen key has no recovery. Custodial platforms have a real record: Mt. Gox (about US$350 million reported stolen, 2011–2014), Coincheck (about US$400 million, 2018), Ronin Network (US$625 million, 2022). If VIIO is self-custodial, that is a point in its favour and worth asking about directly.

Identity and privacy. The terms require you to supply requested information, update it at least yearly, and consent to credit bureau checks. In this category that is normal — anti-money-laundering law requires regulated businesses to verify customers, monitor transactions and report suspicious activity, and where due diligence cannot be completed, accounts get frozen pending documents. Two things to hold onto: your nationality is normally screened separately from your address, because sanctions rules apply to citizenship and country of birth too; and cards of this type are generally available to adults 18 and over.

Security features that do exist are the good ones: dynamic CVV on the virtual card, instant freeze or cancel in the app, instant alerts, and the PIN blocking after three wrong entries. A Visa Secure or Identity Check step may add a one-time code on online payments, and it may not — you cannot tell from the pages. One practical warning that belongs to card payments generally: address verification is mostly a US, Canada and UK thing and is generally unavailable on foreign-issued cards, which causes declines at some merchants; and some shops decline prepaid or foreign-issued cards because the issuer’s country shows up in the card lookup.

Support. Email at [email protected], help centre at intercom.help/viio_help/en, Monday to Friday 9 am to 5 pm with the time zone not stated, pages in Spanish and English. Reasonable, and worth knowing before you are locked out at a weekend.

Deadlines are the real risk. Five business days for a reversal request. A card activated in the app that you cannot access because support is closed. A crypto deposit on a network nobody will confirm. Almost everything that could hurt you here comes down to a small number of dates and screens — so write the reversal deadline down somewhere real.

What to take instead

Three alternatives, each rated against the same criteria as VIIO, so you can see where the trade actually lies. The honest summary: on disclosure, they are not uniformly better.

Morse — 7.5 / 10. The highest-scoring option here, and the one whose card mechanics are most clearly described. Visa prepaid debit, “fully virtual for now”, spending from a Morse Balance in any currency, with “Zero foreign exchange fees or markups” at the real-time Visa rate and free online and contactless payments. The details are unusually explicit. Eligibility is by residence, not citizenship: 18 or older and resident in a supported country, with the app in over 140 countries. Note two catches. Some countries are in closed beta and need an invite code — among them Australia, Hong Kong SAR China, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Türkiye — and the card “is available only in certain countries” with the list checked in the app rather than published. And Morse “cannot serve customers subject to sanctions issued by the United States”, also UK, EU and UN. Its fee card is the least transparent thing about it: issuance and monthly fees are not stated, only “Fees may apply. See Cardholder Agreement”. Deposits by debit card, stablecoin transfer or Account Details (USD, EUR, MXN, COP) are supported, USDC, USDG and EURC via Solana are free while other tokens and blockchains carry a fee, and the wallet is self-custodial.

International Visa Card — 6.7 / 10. Very close to VIIO’s score, and arguably its equal on everyday use. A “U.S.-issued Platinum Visa card”, virtual, paying in USD, with the physical card marked “Coming soon”. Costs are clear: 5 USD one-time for the virtual card, no maintenance fee, plans from Classic free through Pro at 9.00/month to Max at 19.00/month, card use in USD free on all plans, and foreign currency at “Visa exchange rate + 2% FX fee” — a real number, which is more than VIIO gives you. Deposits of any kind are free: USDC or USDT into the USD account at 1:1, plus USD, EUR, SEPA, SWIFT and FedNow rails. No cashback stated. The decisive difference is eligibility, and it is explicit: the account and card are not available to residents or legal registrants of Belarus, mainland China, North Korea, Cuba, India, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela, Vietnam, with FATF grey-list countries reviewed case by case. Purchases are blocked in North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Russia, Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela. And the rule follows residence or registration, not citizenship — citizenship is not mentioned.

UNi Card — 6.1 / 10. A multicurrency card on the Mastercard network, spending from the UNi.Global account balance, with “No annual fee or foreign transaction fee”, assets converted at live over-the-counter rates and “No hidden exchange fees”, plus “Spend-to-Earn rewards” up to 3%. Against that: physical or virtual is not stated, the issuance fee is not stated, top-up methods are not stated, and eligibility is not stated. That last gap is the problem — a card with clean fee language and no published answer to “who can have this” is hard to act on.

Two general points about crypto cards that help you read any of these. First, the card number itself encodes its origin: a 6- or 8-digit issuer identification number at the front tells any merchant which institution and country issued it, and a mismatch with your billing address can invite extra scrutiny — which is exactly why a card issued in one country can look “foreign” in another. Second, the networks license rather than issue: Visa and Mastercard do not issue crypto cards to consumers themselves, and either can suspend a programme. In Europe, an electronic money institution can issue cards and wallets but cannot lend, and must safeguard customer funds in dedicated accounts or by insurance — funds that are not bank deposits and may not sit under a deposit guarantee scheme. The crypto side is regulated separately: MiCA, the EU’s crypto-asset regulation, took legal effect in June 2023, its stablecoin rules applied from 30 June 2024 and the crypto-asset service provider rules from 30 December 2024, with a transitional period running until 1 July 2026 at the latest.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend VIIO to a person living in Colombia who already holds USDC or USDT, wants a dollar-denominated Visa card rather than a peso bank card, and is comfortable treating the card as a front end on a balance rather than as an account with a bank behind it. For that person the price is genuinely good — no monthly fee, no virtual issuance charge, Apple Pay on the virtual card, a dynamic CVV, and free-withdrawal rules that cover the seven listed currencies today. If your spending is mostly in dollars, the card terms’ “currently does not charge any fee” is close to the whole story.

I would not recommend it, without further answers, to someone who needs certainty. If you live outside Colombia, the issuing country list is not published and the contract is Colombian, so the first question is whether you are eligible at all. If you spend in pesos or euros, the conversion cost is not itemised and you would be discovering it at the till. If you plan to run real volume through it, you want the card to name its issuer and its conversion percentage, and right now neither is on the public pages. And if your income is in crypto rather than in pesos, ask about custody first: the card does not state whether your funds sit in a wallet you control, and that question has consequences beyond this card.

My honest read is that VIIO is a young, well-built, sharply priced product for its home market, being marketed wider than its documentation supports. That is not a reason to dismiss it — it is a reason to ask four questions before you fund it: which networks do you accept for deposits, what is the conversion percentage, which bank issues the card, and what happens to a remaining balance if you close the account. Send those to [email protected]. The answers will tell you more than the marketing page does.

Frequently asked questions

What is the VIIO card?

VIIO is a Visa payment card funded from a “Digital USD balance” rather than from a bank account, operated by Persimon S.A.S. under the VIIO name. You load the balance with USDC or USDT, and the card spends it as dollars. Two versions exist: a virtual card with a dynamic CVV, which can be added to Apple Pay, and a physical contactless card. It was launched in Colombia, reported in January 2025 with Visa and Dock.

Is VIIO a bank?

No, not as far as its own pages describe. The issuing bank is not named on the pages I read, and the site footer says VIIO “does not provide or offer regulated financial services”, while the terms say it “does not collect public funds”. In practice that makes VIIO a front end on someone else’s balance — the network routes the payments, a licensed issuer holds the programme. If that distinction matters to you, ask for the issuer’s name before you fund the card.

Does VIIO require KYC?

Yes, in the ordinary way. You confirm legal age, supply requested information, update it at least once a year, and consent to credit bureau checks. The card’s public pages do not state which documents are needed, and no KYC tier structure or per-tier limits are published. Because credit is capped at the value of digital assets in the account, the limits you get depend on what you hold.

How much does the VIIO card cost?

Virtual issuance is free, reissuing a virtual card is 0 USD, and the monthly fee is 0 USD. The physical card is “No cost (currently exempt)”, with 5 USD listed where the balance is under 50 USD, and a replacement physical card costs 5 USD. The terms say “The Card currently does not charge any fee”, but also that fees may be reinstated. Conversion costs are not itemised.

What are VIIO’s fees and limits?

Conversion is the open question: purchases “Depend on the VISA type and exchange rate” and no percentage is published, so treat the Visa spread as your cost of non-dollar spending. ATM withdrawals are possible at any Visa ATM worldwide, with the fee “Depend on the ATM operator” and no free allowance stated. Credit is capped at the value of digital assets held. There is one tier and no paid plans. Spending in dollars from the USD balance is the clean case.

How do I top up the VIIO card?

Three ways: PSE from Colombian pesos at no cost (currently exempt), bank transfer in pesos with no VIIO cost though your bank may charge, and crypto by sending USDC or USDT to a wallet address or QR code. The virtual card needs at least 3 USD in the account first, and the physical card needs 50 USD. The crypto top-up fee is not stated, so confirm it before your first transfer.

Which crypto networks can I use to top up?

The card’s pages do not disclose the supported networks, which is why I would confirm the network inside the app before sending anything. This matters more than it sounds: blockchain transfers are irreversible, so a deposit on an unsupported network can be lost or need manual recovery with no guarantee. And the obvious guess can be wrong — USDT exists on Ethereum, Tron, Solana, Polygon and Avalanche, but Circle stopped supporting USDC on Tron in February 2024.

Can I use VIIO outside Colombia?

Where the card is accepted, yes: it is Visa, and the card page advertises merchants in “200+ countries”, with Visa ATMs worldwide for cash withdrawals. Who may hold it is a different question, and the eligibility country list is not stated in the card terms even though Colombian law governs the contract. Applications run through the app, so the app is the real answer. Reports of added support for Venezuela and Portugal were not confirmed on the pages I read.

Is the VIIO card safe to use?

There is no promise of safety or anonymity here, and the card is not built for either. What it does offer is real: dynamic CVV on the virtual card, instant freeze and cancel in the app, instant alerts, and the PIN blocking after three wrong entries. Apple Pay adds device-specific tokenisation and one-time codes. The risks are the ordinary ones — a custodial provider is exposed to hack and counterparty failure, a foreign-issued card can be declined at some merchants, and a declined payment can hold funds for days.

Is VIIO worth it?

For a Colombian resident who already holds USDC or USDT and wants dollar spending without a dollar bank account, the value is clear: free virtual card, no monthly fee, no stated fee from VIIO itself. If you spend in pesos or euros, cannot confirm the issuing country list, or need to know the conversion percentage and the custodian before committing, it is not yet worth it — the gap is disclosure, not price.

What should I do if I need to dispute a charge?

File it within five business days of becoming aware of the problem. The card accepts reversal requests for fraud, unauthorised purchases, non-delivery and defective goods, handled under Article 51 of the Colombian Consumer Protection Statute. That deadline is short and runs from when you knew, not when you noticed — so note the date at the moment the problem appears rather than when you decide to write.

Who do I contact about the card?

Email [email protected], or use the help centre at intercom.help/viio_help/en. Support hours are Monday to Friday, 9 am to 5 pm, and the time zone is not stated on the page — worth assuming Colombian time until you check. The help centre is in Spanish and English. Note also that the app is iOS as far as is readable: 4.0 out of 5 from 12 ratings in the Colombian App Store, read 2026-10-21.

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