A dollar card built for Colombia, priced well and quiet on the details

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

The VIIO card is a Visa payment card that spends a US dollar balance you hold with Persimon S.A.S., the company behind the VIIO Colombia brand. You load it with USDC or USDT, or with Colombian pesos through PSE or a bank transfer, and then pay with it as you would with any Visa — in stores, online, or at a Visa ATM anywhere in the world. There is a virtual card with a changing security code and a physical contactless card, both drawing on the same balance. What strikes me most, after reading the card’s own pages closely, is how much it does not say: the list of countries that will get you the card is not published, the conversion percentage is not published, the crypto top-up fee is not published, and the issuing bank is not named. What it does say is unusually friendly on price — zero issuance for the virtual card, zero monthly fee, and a card terms page that states the card currently charges no fee at all.

My score for it is 6.6 out of 10. That is a card with genuinely good everyday economics and a lot of unanswered questions around the edges. It suits Colombian residents who want a dollar-denominated Visa card funded by stablecoins, and it does not suit anyone who needs a published fee schedule, a published eligibility list, or the reassurance of a named bank behind the card.

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

The score, criterion by criterion

Total: 6.6 / 10.

I want to be honest about what a score like this is measuring. It is not measuring whether the card works — on paper the product is well made. It is measuring how much I could confirm. The single biggest drag is the reliability and complaints mark, and that is almost entirely a function of silence: I found no official incidents and no user reviews either way, which is not the same as a clean record. It is an absence of evidence. A new-ish product from a small company in a market that has had a lot of crypto card launches will often look like that, and I would hold my conclusions lightly until the card has a longer public history.

Who will they give you the card

The short answer is: the card’s own public pages do not publish an eligibility country list. That is not stated. What is stated runs the other way — the card page says the card works at merchants in “200+ countries”, which is a statement about where you can spend, not where you can sign up.

The one thing that is clear is jurisdiction. The card terms say the contract is governed by Colombian law, and the product is aimed at Colombia. So the honest reading is that this is a Colombian product: built for Colombian residents, and legally a Colombian arrangement. That is not a criticism. Plenty of cards work exactly this way and it simply means the support material, the top-up rails and the complaints process are all designed for one country first.

Two small signals in the help centre reinforce that reading without ever stating it outright. There is a page pointing you to a Colombian bank or PSE top-up route, and there is a question about using a passport without a Colombian ID — the answer to which I did not read. The fact that such a question gets asked at all suggests that people without Colombian identity documents are a real category of applicant, and the fact that it needs a dedicated help page suggests the answer is not a simple yes.

If you are reading this outside Colombia and your mental picture was “a dollar card anyone can sign up for”, that picture is probably wrong, and I would rather you hear it here than after a failed application. If you are a Colombian resident with USDC sitting in a wallet and a shop that would rather not touch Colombian-issued payment instruments, the picture is a different one, and this card is aimed squarely at you.

There is also a document list I could not find. The card terms say you confirm you are of legal age, supply requested information, update it at least yearly, and consent to credit bureau checks. They do not enumerate which documents. So the practical advice is to have your identity document and a proof of address ready, because almost every regulated product will want both, and to expect the list to be given to you in the application rather than published in advance.

How to get it

The path is short. Create the account, verify your identity as asked, and top up.

The two versions of the card have different thresholds, and this is the detail that trips people up:

• The virtual card is free once your account has been topped up with at least 3 USD.
• The physical card needs at least 50 USD in the balance.
• Either way, the card arrives deactivated and you activate it in the app.

That third point matters more than it looks. A card that arrives inactive is normal and good practice; it means nobody can spend on it between the moment it is produced and the moment it reaches you. You just have to remember that a card sitting in your post is not yet usable.

The card itself comes in two forms. The virtual card has a dynamic CVV, meaning the security code changes rather than being printed once and staying fixed — that is a meaningful reduction in the value of a stolen card number, because a screenshot of the front of the card is not enough to use it. The physical card is contactless. Both are Visa. Both spend from what the card calls a Digital USD balance.

Replacement is cheaper than issuance, which is unusual and worth noting: a replacement physical card is 5 USD, while a reissued virtual card is 0 USD. Both are free if the card is defective, or if a disputed charge is resolved in your favour. I would check what the card provider considers defective before you need it, because “resolved in your favour” is doing useful work in that sentence.

What I could not find: where the physical card is delivered, how long it takes, and what it costs to ship. Not stated. Nor is there any mention of verification tiers — nothing about what extra limits or extra checks a higher-verification status would bring.

Fees: what it really costs

This is the strongest part of the card, with one real asterisk. Here is everything the pages state:

Read that table twice, because the third row from the bottom is doing something you need to notice. “Currently exempt” and “may be reinstated” are not the same promise as “free”. A fee that is waived today and can be restored tomorrow is a fee that does not exist yet. The monthly fee of zero is described more firmly than that, but the physical card’s price is explicitly temporary in both directions.

Now the asterisk, which is the honest weakness in this card. The conversion fee is not published. There is no percentage anywhere on the pages I read — just a statement that purchases “depend on the VISA type and exchange rate”, and a claim that you can pay in any currency because VIIO handles the conversion. In practice that means your dollar balance buys things priced in other currencies at a rate you cannot compute in advance. If you eat regularly in euros or pesos from a dollar balance, you should treat that spread as a live, unknown cost and size your spending around it rather than assuming you get a clean 1:1.

Let me put three everyday payments through the card and tell you what I can and cannot say about each.

A coffee in Bogotá, paid in pesos from a dollar balance. This is the everyday case, and it is the case the card is least transparent about. The balance is US dollars; the coffee is priced in Colombian pesos; the card handles the conversion and no conversion percentage is published. You will not be charged a card fee according to the terms, but you will be converted at a rate VIIO chooses or inherits, and the card does not tell you what the margin is.

An online subscription billed in euros. Same shape. The terms say the card currently charges no fee, which is genuinely helpful, but the exchange rate is still the exchange rate Visa and the acquiring side produce, not one VIIO guarantees. The card terms do say credit is capped at the value of the digital assets in the account, so a purchase cannot push you into debt — which is the single most reassuring line in the whole document for anyone used to normal credit cards.

Withdrawing cash at a Visa ATM abroad. Here the transparency is slightly better but not good: the fee “depends on the ATM operator”, VIIO’s own fee is not listed, and there is no free allowance stated. In practice that means the operator’s surcharge is theirs, any card-side charge would be VIIO’s, and you should assume at least one real cost and possibly two. I would use ATMs belonging to the institution you bank with where that is possible, for the same reason.

Two more cost facts that belong here. There is a single tier — virtual and physical card, no paid plans stated — so there is no upgrade ladder to be tempted by later. And your balance is a US dollar balance, while withdrawals are possible in COP, USD, CAD, AUD, EUR, GBP and MXN. That mismatch between the balance currency and the withdrawal currencies is the root of the conversion question: the moment your money leaves dollars, something has to change hands.

Top up: how to load the card

There are two balances, USDC and USDT, and three ways in. This is the section where the card’s design is most obviously aimed at someone who already holds stablecoins.

• Crypto, by wallet address or QR. USDC and USDT into the corresponding balance. The fee is not stated, and the supported networks were not disclosed on the pages I read.
• PSE, in Colombian pesos. This is Colombia’s real-time payment rail. The card says no cost, currently exempt.
• Bank transfer, in Colombian pesos. No VIIO cost; your bank may charge you.

The minimums follow from the card type: 3 USD for the virtual card, 50 USD for the physical one. So the 3 USD floor is a genuine low barrier — you could be paying online within minutes of funding.

The gap in this section is the networks, and it is the gap that matters most. When you send USDC, the network you choose determines whether the money arrives. If you send on a network the provider does not support, or to an address belonging to a different network, the transfer can be lost or need manual support recovery with no guarantee — blockchain transfers are one-way by design, and there is no chargeback button on a chain. So the practical rule is: confirm the supported network inside the app before you send anything, and only ever use the address or QR the app itself gives you. Sending a token to a copied address is how people lose money; a clipboard that silently swaps one address for another is a known attack, not a theoretical one.

Worth knowing so you are not surprised at the other end: USDC and USDT are not the same network story. USDC is issued natively on a long list of networks, and Circle stopped supporting USDC on Tron in February 2024, so “USDC over TRC20” is not a native option. USDT has its own set, including Tron. And one more thing that catches people out: on Ethereum, fees are paid in ETH, not in the token you are sending. A wallet holding USDT with no ETH in it cannot send the USDT at all.

Withdrawals are cheap in VIIO’s own account of them — “no cost (currently exempt)” for those seven currencies — and a transfer out to a crypto wallet costs only the network fee. What the pages do not address is what happens to a remaining balance if you close the account. Not stated, and that is worth asking support about before you ever close anything, because an orphaned balance in a closed account is one of the few genuinely painful mistakes available in this product.

Paying with it every day

The virtual card is the one I would actually use most. A dynamic CVV means the three-digit code changes, so the classic attack of photographing your card and reusing the number does not work, and a virtual card can be created, frozen and thrown away without waiting for anything to arrive in the post. The physical card is a standard contactless Visa — nothing remarkable, which is a compliment here; you want it to work at the till and not require thought.

Apple Pay is confirmed for the virtual card. Google Pay is not disclosed. If your phone is Android, treat mobile wallet support as unknown rather than absent — many products support one and not the other, and the pages only name one.

Then there are the things nobody publishes that you discover at the till.

• Merchant category restrictions. Not stated. Some issuers block whole categories — gambling is the classic one, category code 7995 — by policy rather than by law, and the blocked list differs by issuer. You should assume nothing is guaranteed here and find out before you need it.
• Where the card gets declined. The card number carries the issuer’s country in its first six or eight digits, and merchants can look that up and apply extra scrutiny when it differs from the billing address. This is why a card issued in one country can look foreign to a shop in another. Some merchants decline prepaid or foreign-issued cards precisely because of what the lookup reveals. Colombian-issued BIN being read as foreign somewhere is a realistic possibility, not a theoretical one.
• Address verification. The billing-address check that catches fraud is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK, and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards — which can cause declines on their own.
• Holds. A declined authorisation can leave a hold on your funds that stays for several days, typically up to seven.

The app is iOS, from the Colombian App Store, rated 4.0 out of 5 across 12 ratings as I read it. Twelve ratings is a very small sample; it tells you almost nothing about reliability. The Google Play rating was not readable because the page was truncated. I would not treat 4.0 as a verdict in either direction, but I also would not skip reading the app reviews yourself before you start.

On disputes, the position is clear and it is good: reversal requests — for fraud, unauthorised purchases, non-delivery or defective goods — must be filed within five business days of becoming aware, and are handled under Article 51 of the Colombian Consumer Protection Statute. Five business days is short. Put the date in your calendar the moment something goes wrong, because missing it is the most likely way to lose a claim you would otherwise win. I would also know the general shape of card reversal rights before you need them: a chargeback is a refund the issuer orders to settle a dispute, with reason codes such as fraud, duplicate billing or goods not received. US rights come from Regulation E for debit and Regulation Z for credit; prepaid coverage varies and should not be assumed to apply.

What can go wrong

Let me sort this into what I confirmed, what is a property of the category, and what is simply unknown.

Confirmed, from the card’s own pages:

• The issuing bank is not named on the pages I read. Persimon S.A.S. (VIIO Colombia) is the brand and legal entity; the footer states the company “does not provide or offer regulated financial services”, and the terms say VIIO “does not collect public funds”.
• Press coverage — La Republica, January 2025 — reports a launch of a USDC dollar card in Colombia with Visa and Dock.
• Venezuela and Portugal additions are not confirmed on the pages I read. Treat any claim that VIIO now serves those countries as unverified.
• No official incidents were found, and no Trustpilot or Reddit reviews turned up in the complaints search. A complaint page was not stated to exist.

Unknown, and these are the ones to price in:

• Whether your money is held in custody, and by whom. Not stated. The terms say VIIO does not receive or manage user money, which points toward a pass-through structure, but the custodial status itself is not spelled out and I will not infer it.
• The exchange-rate margin on every purchase.
• Supported crypto networks for top-up.
• Physical card delivery country, time and cost.
• Whether Google Pay is supported, and which merchant categories are blocked.
• What happens to a leftover balance when you close the account.

Inherent to the category, regardless of this card:

• Holding funds with a custodian carries counterparty and hack risk. The history is not abstract: Mt. Gox (about US$350 million reported stolen 2011–2014), Coincheck (about US$400 million, 2018), Ronin Network (US$625 million, 2022).
• Crypto transfers are typically irreversible, and a stolen private key has no recovery mechanism — the network cannot freeze or return funds.
• Programmes close. Card networks can suspend an issuer or end an agreement: WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied several crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018 and all its Visa programmes closed; Visa said in November 2022 that it had “terminated our global agreements with FTX”, and the FTX US debit card was wound down. Closures typically follow a notice period, then stop spending and loading, then ask users to withdraw remaining balances.
• Stablecoins are not stable by definition. TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022; USDC temporarily lost its peg in March 2023 during the US banking crisis. Your balance is denominated in dollars, but it is backed by tokens.
• Sanctions screening is real and applies on citizenship and country of birth, not only address. Tether says it disables tokens in wallets on the OFAC sanctions list and has frozen funds tied to illicit activity — so stablecoins are not censorship-proof.

What is actually there to protect you, on this card specifically: dynamic CVV on the virtual card; instant freeze and instant cancel in the app; instant alerts; and a PIN that blocks after three wrong entries. That is a good list. It is the standard modern set plus one genuinely good idea in the dynamic CVV.

What to take instead

If VIIO’s open questions are the problem rather than its features, the alternatives are worth measuring against it. Here is how the three I looked at compare, on the terms each publishes:

Four things fall out of that comparison.

The International Visa Card is the closest rival and, on published numbers, slightly ahead. It publishes its foreign currency fee — Visa exchange rate plus 2% — which is more information than VIIO gives you about conversion. It publishes a $5 issuance fee where VIIO publishes zero. Its exclusions are published in full, which is either a strength or a bluntness depending on your situation, and it is stricter than VIIO in a way that would rule some people out entirely. Note its physical card is “coming soon”: if you want plastic in your hand today, VIIO wins.

UNi Card is the cleanest on fees and the vaguest on facts. “No annual fee or foreign transaction fee”, assets converted at live OTC rates, “no hidden exchange fees” — that is the most explicit cost promise in this group, and it beats VIIO’s silence. But its eligibility, funding routes and card format are simply not stated, which is its own kind of silence.

Whop Cards score lowest and are aimed at a different buyer. US-state coverage, 5% cashback at Uber, and a balance model rather than a card balance. Its eligibility basis — citizenship or residence — is not stated, and neither are the coins or networks it uses.

And the general lesson for anyone comparing these: every one of these cards is a front end on someone else’s licence. A card number begins with digits that identify the issuing institution, and the rest is an account identifier plus a check digit — which means the institution behind the card matters, and the brand you typed into the app is often only a programme manager. Visa and Mastercard do not issue crypto cards to consumers themselves; they license issuers and can suspend a programme. In Europe an e-money institution can issue e-money and payment cards but cannot lend, and must safeguard customer funds by segregating them or insuring them — funds that are not the same as bank deposits and may not sit under a deposit guarantee scheme. Under the EU’s markets-in-crypto-assets regulation (MiCA, Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, in legal effect since June 2023 per ESMA), the stablecoin rules applied from 30 June 2024 and the crypto-asset service provider rules from 30 December 2024; e-money tokens may be issued only by a credit institution or an e-money institution, and providers operating under national law can continue only until 1 July 2026 or until a MiCA authorisation is granted or refused, whichever comes first. ESMA keeps a public register of authorised providers. That is the single most useful thing you can do before committing money to any of these cards: look the provider up there.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend VIIO to a Colombian resident who already holds USDC or USDT, wants a dollar-denominated Visa, and is comfortable treating the conversion rate as an unknown cost. That person gets a card with zero monthly cost, zero virtual issuance, a dynamic CVV on the virtual card, real contactless plastic, ATMs worldwide, and top-ups from a crypto wallet without giving up control of the coins beforehand. That is a genuinely good product for that person, and I would not talk them out of it.

I would not recommend it to you if any of these are true. You are outside Colombia and hoping the card is open to anyone — the eligibility list is not published and the contract is Colombian. You are budgeting tightly and need to know what a purchase will cost — the conversion percentage is not published and I would not build a plan on an unpublished spread. You need the name of the bank behind the card — it is not named on the pages I read. You are sending meaningful sums and cannot tolerate that a wrong network means the money is gone; that risk sits with any on-chain top-up, but here the supported networks are not disclosed, which means you cannot pre-check. You are Android and mobile wallet support is your main route to paying — Google Pay is not disclosed. Or you are simply the kind of person who needs a published, itemised fee schedule before signing up, and honestly, that is a reasonable position and this card will not meet it.

My one piece of advice, if you do go ahead: keep the first balance small, test a top-up and a small purchase end to end, and ask support the two questions the pages do not answer — what the conversion rate margin is, and what happens to a leftover balance if you close the account. The support route is [email protected], with a help centre at intercom.help/viio_help/en, and the help centre states hours of Monday to Friday, 9 am to 5 pm with the time zone not stated. The pages are in Spanish and English.

And one last thing worth saying plainly, because it is easy to skip: in most places, spending crypto through a card is a taxable event. Digital assets are generally treated as property, so converting them to dollars or goods produces a gain or a loss, measured in your local currency at fair market value on the date of the transaction — which can make each card payment its own separate disposal. I am not giving you tax advice and you should not take this as such; but check what applies where you live, because “load once and spend all year” is exactly the pattern that creates a long list of small reportable events.

Frequently asked questions

What is the VIIO card?

The VIIO card is a Visa payment card issued through Persimon S.A.S., the company behind the VIIO Colombia brand. It spends a US dollar balance you hold there rather than a bank account. You load that balance with USDC or USDT, Colombian pesos through PSE, or a bank transfer, and then pay with the card online or in stores, or withdraw at a Visa ATM worldwide. There are two versions — a virtual card with a dynamic CVV and a physical contactless card — and both draw on the same balance.

How does the VIIO card actually work?

It behaves like a prepaid card rather than a debit card. When you buy something, the merchant charges the card, and the charge comes out of the balance you have already loaded — so the card cannot overdraw. Your crypto is converted into the dollar balance first, not at the moment of purchase. The card terms say credit is capped at the value of the digital assets in your account, which is the clearest statement in the whole document about what happens if you spend more than you hold.

Is VIIO a bank?

No, and the card’s own footer says so. The footer states the company “does not provide or offer regulated financial services”, and the terms say VIIO “does not collect public funds”. Persimon S.A.S. is the operating company behind the VIIO Colombia brand. The issuing bank is not named on the pages I read. Visa and Mastercard do not issue these cards themselves — they license issuers, and here VIIO appears to be running the programme on top of someone else’s licence.

Who owns VIIO?

The card’s terms name Persimon S.A.S., trading as the VIIO Colombia brand, and the footer uses the name “Persimon (VIIO)”. Press coverage in La Republica from January 2025 reported the launch of a USDC dollar card in Colombia with Visa and Dock. Claims that VIIO has expanded to Venezuela or Portugal are not confirmed on the pages I read, so treat those as unverified rather than as news.

Is the VIIO card free?

Mostly, yes. Virtual issuance is free, virtual reissue is 0 USD, and the monthly fee is 0 USD. The physical card is listed as “no cost (currently exempt)” but the same page lists 5 USD if your balance is under 50 USD, and the card terms warn that fees may be reinstated. A replacement physical card costs 5 USD. The real unknown is conversion: no percentage is published, so the cost of spending a dollar balance on a peso or euro purchase cannot be worked out in advance.

How do I top up the VIIO card?

Three ways: send USDC or USDT to the wallet address or QR shown in the app, pay Colombian pesos through PSE, or make a Colombian peso bank transfer. PSE is listed as no cost while exempt; bank transfer carries no VIIO cost but your bank may charge you. The virtual card needs a top-up of at least 3 USD, and the physical card needs at least 50 USD. Check which networks are supported inside the app before sending — the supported networks were not disclosed on the pages I read.

Does VIIO require KYC?

Yes, and the details are thinner than you would like. The terms say you confirm you are of legal age, supply the information requested, update it at least yearly, and consent to credit bureau checks. The list of required documents is not stated, and no verification tiers are described. The reason the card collects this is standard: regulated businesses must verify customers and monitor transactions under anti-money-laundering law, which is why accounts get frozen pending documents.

Is the VIIO card safe?

The security features it does publish are good: a dynamic CVV on the virtual card, instant freeze and cancel in the app, instant alerts, and a PIN that blocks after three wrong entries. What is not stated is whether funds are held in custody and by whom — the terms say VIIO does not receive or manage user money, which points one way, but the custodial status is not spelled out. I found no official incidents and no Trustpilot or Reddit reviews, which is an absence of evidence rather than a clean record.

Can I use the VIIO card in my country?

The card page says it works at merchants in “200+ countries”, and Visa ATMs worldwide. Where you can *sign up* is a different question, and the eligibility country list is not stated. The contract is governed by Colombian law and the product is aimed at Colombia. Also relevant to where you are spending: merchants can look up the issuer country in the card’s first digits and apply extra scrutiny when it differs from your billing address, and some decline foreign-issued or prepaid cards outright.

How do I delete my VIIO account or withdraw my money?

Withdrawals are the clearer half. You can withdraw to COP, USD, CAD, AUD, EUR, GBP or MXN, and the card lists this as “no cost (currently exempt)”. A transfer out to a crypto wallet costs only the blockchain network fee, with none charged by VIIO. Closing the account is the gap — what happens to a remaining balance is not addressed on the pages I read, so ask support at [email protected] before you close anything with money still in it.

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