hi Card review: a virtual Mastercard that works from an IBAN, weighed against 1.8 stars from 587 reviews

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

The hi card is a virtual debit card — there is no plastic in the post — that spends either the money sitting in a personal bank account in EUR or GBP, or a crypto balance held inside the hi app. It works wherever Mastercard is accepted, which the card puts at “more than 90 million merchants”. That is the pitch, and on paper it is a neat one for someone who cannot get an ordinary bank card or who wants to spend crypto without touching an exchange.

The problems start as soon as you try to verify the basics. On the card’s own pages, the countries are not stated, the fees are not stated, the daily and monthly limits are not stated, the coins and networks you can use are not stated, the cash machine situation is not stated, and the physical card is not mentioned at all. What is stated is a virtual card, a EUR or GBP IBAN link, activation after address verification, and cashback in crypto with no rates given. Then there is the other half of the picture: Trustpilot shows 1.8 out of 5 from 587 reviews, with user reports of blocked cards, a rewards rate cut from 8% to 1%, withdrawal trouble around the UK exit, and allegations of fraud attached to the HI token.

My score for hi is 4.9 out of 10. That is not a rounding of something rosier — it is what the card has actually shown, both on its own site and in what its users report.

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

The score, and who this card is actually for

Here is the breakdown, criterion by criterion, with the marks exactly as I have them and my own reason for each.

Two groups come out of this. The first is existing hi app members in Europe already paying from an IBAN: they have the app, the account, the verification done, and a working balance, and for them a virtual card that spends that balance is a convenience rather than a question. The second is anyone drawn by the cashback or by the crypto name who has not yet opened a hi account — and that is where this review turns unfriendly, because the things you would need to check before signing up are the things the card does not publish.

If your situation is a blocked or unavailable ordinary bank card, read the risks section before anything else. If your situation is a working current account and you want a second virtual card for subscriptions, you have cheaper and more transparent options further down this page.

Will they give you the card?

The card’s own pages do not name any countries. That is the plain answer, and it is an unusual one to have to give.

Unofficial information fills some of the gap. At launch in 2022, coverage by Mastercard and the press described the card as offered to members in 25+ EEA countries and the UK. That is third-party reporting, not a statement from hi, and it does not describe today. Later Trustpilot reviews say the UK was dropped — the same reviews that describe members being told to withdraw by January. So the unofficial picture is: broad European availability at the start, with at least one country since removed.

Starting data names the market as the EEA. Since the official page does not confirm which member states are open to new applicants now, and since the UK story suggests membership can be withdrawn, the only reliable way to answer “can I have it in my country” is to register in the app and see whether an address is accepted. I am not going to invent a country list for you here.

The card also does not say anything about age, or about which documents it needs. Cards of this kind are generally issued to adults, and a verified address is the one step the card does describe: the help text says that once your address has been verified you can activate the card, in the app’s Card section.

How to get it

The path the card describes is short, and it is short in a way that leaves gaps.

• Register in the hi app — that is the stated home of the card, which has its own Card section.
• Have your address verified. The card’s own wording: “Once your address has been verified, you will be able to activate the card.”
• Activate the virtual card in the app’s Card section.

What you are not told: what documents are required, what age you must be, how long verification takes, or what happens if verification fails. There is a “Identity verification (KYC)” collection in the help centre, but it was not open, so I cannot tell you what sits in it.

On the card itself: it is virtual only as far as the current page goes. “Virtual debit cards are now available” is what the 30 June 2026 help article says — the phrasing suggests this is a recent change rather than the original product. A help article dated 30 June 2026 stating virtual cards are “now available” is a genuinely odd signal to sit with, and I would rather raise it than smooth it over: if virtual availability is new, then what these users had before is not explained on the pages I can see. Whether a physical card exists, is coming, or never existed is not stated.

On the company side, starting data names hi Technology Limited. Press from 2022 reported the card being issued by Moorwand Ltd, a Mastercard principal member, with a Contis partnership announced for the debit card and fiat accounts. The official page is silent on all of that, which means from the card alone you cannot confirm who issues the card that sits in your wallet. For an e-money product that is not a small detail — the issuer is the institution your money is actually held by.

Fees, limits, and what a payment really costs

No fees are published. The card states no issuance fee, no monthly fee, no conversion fee, no foreign-exchange fee, no cash-machine fee, and no spending limits. Unofficial reviews (an undated ueex blog piece) describe a card with no transaction, FX or issuance fees, with issuance free for eligible users who complete KYC, while noting that fees may apply later. That last clause is the one to hold on to. A product with no published fee schedule is a product whose fee schedule is a decision someone else makes later.

Here is what I could and could not find:

Now the part that matters more than the table, because fees are only interesting in the context of what you are buying.

Coffee, paid from your IBAN. You top nothing up. You spend euros you already hold, the card behaves like a normal debit card against that account, and whatever fee exists — if any — is the one not published. The risk here is not the coffee; it is that you have no way to forecast the rate at which the balance will run down.

A subscription in a currency your IBAN does not hold. Here the IBAN stops being a simple answer. The card’s currency is the currency of your IBAN — EUR or GBP — and if that balance runs out you either top it up or “choose another secondary currency”, one at a time, set in the app. So a euro account paying a dollar merchant is not a plain debit purchase; it is a second-currency purchase, and it is exactly where an unstated conversion or FX fee would live. You are not being told the rate or the markup.

Spending crypto held at hi. The card says you can pay with crypto you hold at hi. Anything the app charges to get from the token to the merchant’s currency is a cost, and the card does not publish it.

The currency point deserves one more sentence because it is easy to misread. “One secondary currency at a time” means the card holds EUR *or* GBP as its IBAN currency plus one additional currency. That is not the same as holding many balances and choosing per purchase.

Top up: what actually funds the card

The card is funded by your IBAN by default, and optionally by crypto held at hi. That is the whole stated mechanism.

• By IBAN. The card links by default to the currency of your personal IBAN — EUR or GBP — and transactions are covered by the funds in that IBAN. This is the ordinary path.
• By crypto at hi. You can also pay with crypto held in hi, in one secondary currency at a time, configured in the app under secondary payment currency.

What is not stated: which coins, which networks, minimums, maximums, arrival times, or fees. That is a serious omission, not a formatting quibble. Sending a token over a network the provider does not support can be lost outright, because blockchain transfers are irreversible — there is no chargeback on a misrouted deposit, only a support request. And if you are paying with crypto from hi, you are not topping up an address at all; you are spending an internal balance, which is a different risk and a different set of questions.

So for the everyday case — you already have a EUR account and you want to pay with a virtual Mastercard — top-up is not really the feature. It is the linked account doing the work. The top-up story only starts to matter if you want to spend from the crypto side, and that is precisely where the card is silent about coins and networks.

Two related things are also not stated: direct top-up methods to the card itself, and cashing money back out to a bank account. For withdrawals, the user reports are the only source, and they are not encouraging: complaints about withdrawal problems cluster around the UK exit.

Paying with it every day

It works where Mastercard works, it is virtual only, and the mobile wallet story is unconfirmed.

The card says it is accepted at “more than 90 million merchants”, which is Mastercard’s standard reach rather than a claim unique to hi. A virtual card behaves as its number behaves: fine at most online checkouts, awkward at anything that wants to swipe, and unusable in any shop that insists on physical contact. There is no physical card on this page.

What you should know about everyday use:

• Apple Pay and Google Pay are not named. Not available, not mentioned — the card’s public pages do not say. A user review reports Google Pay not working during a card block in 2023. If a mobile wallet is the reason you want a card, treat this as unconfirmed.
• Cash machines are not addressed at all. If you take money out regularly, you have no basis here.
• Rewards exist but are unquantified. The card says users can “earn rewards in crypto”. No rate, no tiers, no conditions. Unofficial launch coverage in 2022 described 1–10% back on spending depending on tier. Treat that as historical, not current.
• Disputes are not described. No chargeback process, no reason codes, no timeframe is stated on the card’s pages. A declined payment may also leave a hold on your funds for several days.

That last point about holds is general to card payments rather than specific to hi, but it matters here precisely because the card’s own pages promise no limits and no dispute route. If a payment is declined, you are waiting on the issuer with no published clock.

One more everyday-use note that is not a defect but a design choice: because the card spends an IBAN balance or an app balance, the card’s most valuable audience is someone who already has both. That is a narrower group than the crypto-card marketing usually implies.

What can go wrong

This is the section that moved the score most, and I want to be specific rather than atmospheric.

Trustpilot shows 1.8 out of 5 from 587 reviews. That is a large body of negative reports, and it was the number that pulled reliability down to 2 out of 10.

• The UK exit and withdrawal trouble. User reports from 2023–24 describe problems with the UK withdrawal, with members told to withdraw by January (reported December 2023). If a market is closed, the question is not whether you can use the card but whether you can get your money out.
• The rewards were cut. A reported change from 8% back to 1% in July 2023, alongside tier changes across 2022–23. This is the clearest illustration of the risk in any unquantified reward: it is not a discount, it is a variable the provider controls.
• The card was blocked. A review from around August–September 2023 describes a card blocked for two months with Google Pay not working. For someone who depends on a card for everyday spending, a two-month freeze is not an inconvenience.
• The HI token. Reports of value loss and of scam or rug-pull allegations around the token in 2023–25.

I am reporting what users said, not adjudicating it — I have no way to verify individual complaints from the card’s side. But a pattern this consistent, across this many reviews, is not something to average away with a 4.9.

Three structural risks sit underneath the complaints, and none of them are hi-specific:

Where the money actually sits. A crypto card usually involves three parties: the network (Mastercard here) routing payments and setting rules, the issuer — a bank or licensed e-money institution — actually holding the card programme and your funds, and the crypto brand, which is often just the front end. Only the middle one is your counterparty when money is stuck.

Custody. If your crypto is held with a provider rather than in a wallet you control, you are trusting that provider with the credentials, and a seed phrase in the wrong hands can be spent with no recovery and no reversal. Providers have failed before, and the pattern of large losses is well documented.

Licences and their limits. Under EU rules, e-money funds must be safeguarded — segregated or insured — but that is not the same as a bank deposit and may not sit under a deposit guarantee scheme. If you are reading this outside the EU, the regime is different again.

What the card does not state, and what I would want before trusting it with money: its security arrangements (no 2FA details, no freeze features, no spending-limit controls published), its dispute process, and the identity of the issuer on whose balance the money would sit. There is a help centre with a “Contact hi” collection, in English and French, but the channels, hours and languages of actual support are not stated.

What to take instead

If your problem is “I need a card that works and costs nothing to hold”, the alternatives below are stronger on published information, even where the product is not perfect. I am comparing what is on the table, not endorsing any of them.

International Visa Card, at 6.7, is the most transparent of the three on price. It publishes a $5 one-time issuance fee, no maintenance fee, and a specific FX rule: “Visa exchange rate + 2% FX fee”, with card use in USD free on all plans and deposits free. Those are numbers you can check against your own spending. Its restrictions are explicit and harsh — the account and card are not available to residents or legal registrants of a long list including Belarus, mainland China, North Korea, Cuba, India, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam, and purchases are blocked in North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Russia, Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela. Note the basis: residence or registration, not citizenship.

UNi Card, at 6.1, is a multicurrency Mastercard that spends from a UNi.Global balance, and it says “no annual fee or foreign transaction fee” with assets converted at live OTC rates. Up to 3% spend-to-Earn. Its country eligibility and funding route are not stated.

Whop Cards, at 5.2, are Visa cards spending from a Whop balance, with 5% cashback at select merchants — currently Uber — and a page that says “no extra fees”. Its consumer reach is 31 US states by name, with 31 unsupported countries listed for consumers. Whether eligibility rests on citizenship or residence is not stated.

The honest summary: on every criterion where hi has no published answer, each of these three has at least a partial one. That is the gap, and it is a gap in information before it is a gap in product.

Who I would recommend it to

To be direct: I would recommend hi to someone who already uses hi, already has a verified IBAN in EUR or GBP, and wants a virtual Mastercard that spends it without fuss. For that person the unknowns matter less, because the money is already where the card can reach it and the relationship is already established.

I would not recommend it as a first move, for three reasons. You cannot check the fees, because they are not published and unofficial reports already flag that fees may appear later. You cannot check the reward, because a rate that went from 8% to 1% is not a rate you can plan around. And you cannot check the trust position from the card’s side, because 1.8 from 587 reviews is a large, recent body of complaints about exactly the things that would hurt you — being blocked, and being unable to withdraw.

If your blocker is that you cannot open an ordinary bank card, then none of these solves that and I would not pretend otherwise. What I would do is this: open the app and test an address first, before committing money; use it only for a small, replaceable balance; and keep a record of transactions, because a card with no published dispute process is a card where your own notes are your best evidence.

Frequently asked questions

What is the hi card?

The hi card is a virtual Mastercard debit card that spends either money from your personal bank account in EUR or GBP, or a crypto balance held inside the hi app. It works where Mastercard is accepted, which the card describes as more than 90 million merchants. There is no physical version described on the card’s current pages, so everything happens through the app and the card number.

Is hi a bank?

Not on the evidence available here. Starting data names hi Technology Limited, and press from 2022 reported the card issued by Moorwand Ltd with a Contis partnership. The card’s own page is silent on who issues it. E-money funds are safeguarded but are not bank deposits and may not be covered by a deposit guarantee scheme, so I would not treat a hi balance as banked money.

Who owns hi, and who issues the card?

The official pages do not say. The starting data names hi Technology Limited as the company; 2022 press reported the card issued by Moorwand Ltd, a Mastercard principal member, alongside an announced Contis partnership. That is press and unofficial material, not a confirmation from the card. Visa and Mastercard do not issue crypto cards themselves — they license issuers.

Which countries is the hi card available in?

The card does not name any. Unofficial 2022 coverage described availability in 25+ EEA countries plus the UK, with the UK later withdrawn per user reviews. Because membership appears to change, the only reliable test is whether the app accepts your address. The rule, where one exists elsewhere in the category, usually follows residence rather than citizenship.

Does hi require KYC, and how do I activate it?

Identity verification is required in practice, though the card does not publish which documents or what age. What it does state is that once your address has been verified you can activate the card, in the app’s Card section. A “Identity verification (KYC)” section exists in the help centre but its contents are not stated.

How much does hi cost?

Officially, nothing is stated — no issuance fee, no monthly fee, no conversion or FX fee, no ATM fee, no limits. Unofficial reviews describe no transaction, FX or issuance fees and free issuance after KYC, while noting fees may apply later. With no fee schedule, you cannot calculate what a payment costs, and a later fee can be introduced without much warning.

Is the hi card free?

There is no published charge on the card’s pages at all, which is different from a stated “free”. Unofficial sources describe issuance as free for eligible users who complete KYC. Your real cost is likely to appear in the second currency you use and in the conversion rate when your IBAN currency is not the merchant’s currency.

Can I add the hi card to Apple Wallet or Google Pay?

Neither wallet is named on the card’s official pages, so this is unconfirmed rather than supported. A user review from 2023 describes Google Pay not working during a period when the card was blocked. If a phone wallet is essential to how you pay, verify it inside the app before relying on it.

Is hi card safe and reliable?

On current evidence, I would not call it reliable. Trustpilot shows 1.8 out of 5 from 587 reviews, with reports of a card blocked for two months, a rewards rate cut from 8% to 1%, withdrawal problems around the UK exit, and scam allegations around the HI token. The card publishes no security details, no dispute process and no issuer information.

Is hi worth it, and how do I top it up?

Worth it mainly if you already bank with hi’s model — an EUR or GBP account, money sitting there, and an existing app relationship. The card links by default to your IBAN currency and can also spend crypto held at hi, one secondary currency at a time. Which coins and networks are accepted is not stated, which matters because transfers on a wrong network are usually irreversible.

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