HesabPay Launches Free Virtual Visa Cards in Afghanistan, Aims for 1M

2026-08-21

payments · visa · afghanistan · stablecoin · humanitarian · discovery · web

HesabPay Launches Free Virtual Visa Cards in Afghanistan, Aims for 1M

A Card Launch in Kabul

On August 13, 2026, officials from Da Afghanistan Bank, Afghanistan's central bank, joined HesabPay's leadership at an event in Kabul to unveil the Hesab Visa Pay virtual card: a card issued through the app that lets verified users spend their wallet balances on international websites, online courses, hotel bookings and digital subscriptions without first withdrawing cash. Deputy supervision director Ahmad Shahpoor Mia Khail used the stage to push the country toward digital payments, telling the room: 'Our sole objective is to enable every Afghan to make payments using a card, mobile phone or other means.' Company officials put HesabPay's active customer base in Afghanistan at around one million, and director-general Sanzar Kakar said card integration had been roughly five years in the making.

The card rides Visa Pay, the network's SDK-based virtual card program that Visa expanded to issuers across Africa and Central Asia in July 2026; Afghanistan is listed among the covered markets. In Visa's own announcement, Kakar said HesabPay planned 'to launch up to 1 million Visa cards for customers in Afghanistan through Visa Pay,' which he credited with letting the company scale 'without relying on multiple third-party vendors for card management, processing, 3-D Secure and other capabilities.'

What the Card Costs, and What It Does

The card is issued only to verified HesabPay accounts: a user creates an account, verifies it with an original national ID (NID), awaits approval, and the card appears in the app. Despite the landing page promising an 'instant' card, the FAQ tells verified users to allow 24-48 hours after approval before checking again. There is no separate funding step — whatever sits in the HesabPay wallet is the card's spending power, converted to dollars at the prevailing exchange rate. HesabPay's own footer notes it is a licensed financial services provider, not a bank, and that account funds may not be eligible for deposit insurance.

Concept	Real-World Implication
No issuance, monthly, annual, 3-D Secure or SMS fees	Holding the card costs nothing; the only built-in charge is currency conversion
~1% foreign-exchange fee on AFN-to-USD conversion	A 20,000 AFN purchase (roughly $300) carries about a 200 AFN (~$3) conversion cost
Weekly limit 20,000 AFN (~$300); monthly limit 80,000 AFN (~$1,200)	Central-bank-set caps reset weekly and monthly; users cannot raise them on demand, though HesabPay says it is working to increase them
No physical card and no card-to-card transfers yet	The card is currently a spending tool for online and international payments, not a money-movement product

The current scope is deliberately narrow: eligible online and international payments on websites and apps that accept Visa. The company's July announcement frames a wider ambition — in-store payments, and a concrete scenario for Afghan pilgrims. Hesab notes that more than 20 million people visit Makkah and Madina every year for Umrah or Hajj; a pilgrim who today carries cash through ihram could instead tap a phone to pay for daily expenses and have family top the card up from home through Visa Direct. Kakar told Pajhwok Afghan News that covering Umrah costs was a specific goal.

The Wallet Around the Card

The card is one layer of a wallet built for a country where most people have no bank account and daily commerce runs on cash. HesabPay's site describes the channels it uses to reach those users:

Concept	Real-World Implication
[USSD](/glossary/ussd "A mobile phone protocol that lets users access text-based services on basic feature phones without an internet connection, often used for mobile payme") code *580#	The wallet runs on any handset with signal via USSD, a menu protocol built into mobile networks — no smartphone, data plan or app store needed
E-Hawala cash pickup	A sender can move money to someone without a wallet; the recipient gets an SMS and collects cash from any of 1,200+ agents
HesabPOS terminals	Merchants accept QR, NFC, chip cards and cash on one device, with real-time transaction tracking
Ask HesabPay assistant	An in-app assistant executes transfers, top-ups and bill payments from natural-language instructions
Bulk payments	One account can pay 1 to 100,000 people in a single action, with multi-level approval
Developer APIs	RESTful endpoints, WooCommerce and WordPress plugins, split payments and a sandbox for testing integrations

HesabPay says it processes about $160 million across more than one million transactions each month, funded through more than 20 channels including international cards, bank accounts, Apple Pay and Google Pay — and, in some markets, cryptocurrency.

Why an Afghan Wallet Runs on Algorand

The Visa card does not put each purchase on a blockchain — a card authorization touches Visa's network — but the balance it spends rests on the wallet's settlement stack, which is Algorand. HesabPay migrated to the network in 2022, and its economics explain why: Algorand's [Pure Proof-of-Stake](/glossary/pure-proof-of-stake-ppos "A consensus mechanism used by some blockchains to validate transactions and secure the network. Unlike traditional proof-of-work, it relies on validat") consensus settles transactions in about 4.5 seconds at fractions of a cent, which matters when the average payment is small and the country's banking system is largely cut off from international [correspondent banking](/glossary/correspondent-banking "The system by which banks in different countries hold accounts with each other to process international transfers; when global banks withdraw these re") — the web of accounts banks hold with each other to clear cross-border payments. A [stablecoin](/glossary/stablecoin "A cryptocurrency whose value is designed to stay stable, usually by being pegged 1:1 to a traditional currency like the US dollar (e.g. USDC) or, in H"), a token pegged to a traditional currency rather than swinging with crypto markets, anchors the system: the wallet issues [digital afghani](/glossary/hafn "A digital currency issued by HesabPay, pegged to the Afghan afghani and minted on the Algorand blockchain against fiat deposits, used to pay aid recip") as HAFN, an [Algorand Standard Asset](/glossary/algorand-standard-asset "A built-in mechanism that allows anyone to create and issue new tokens (like stablecoins, utility tokens, or NFTs) directly on Algorand's base layer, ") held by more than 78,000 wallets. One honest caveat: HAFN is a closed-loop rail, not a market instrument — market-data trackers list no exchange trading for it, and nearly its entire [on-chain](/glossary/on-chain "Describes transactions that are recorded and permanently stored on a blockchain ledger, making them publicly visible and tamper-resistant.") supply sits in the creator account.

The on-chain traffic is real and still settling: HAFN transfers were recorded as recently as August 21, 2026, the day this article was researched. Citing an Algorand case study, earlier reporting put HesabPay's cumulative on-chain volume past 3.5 million transactions, including about 170,000 electricity bill payments per month worth roughly $4 million — around 30 percent of Afghanistan's electricity bills. The humanitarian use case has scaled further since: on July 15, 2026, the Algorand Foundation, citing UNHCR, reported that more than 625,000 refugee returnees and over 17,500 internally displaced people had received over $35 million through reloadable HesabPay cards. Mercy Corps ran a follow-on pilot with HesabPay in Syria, sending $30,000 in USDC, a dollar-pegged stablecoin, to 100 smallholder farmers in Al-Hasakah and cutting delivery from an average of 28 days to under one day.

A Second Chain for the Global Bank

Then, on July 7, 2026, Hesab — the corporate entity behind HesabPay — announced that its next big build would not be on Algorand. The company selected Movement as the exclusive stablecoin settlement layer for its Global Self-Custody Bank, a platform aimed at the roughly 1.4 billion unbanked adults, with Africa and the Middle East as announced next targets. Movement is a settlement and yield layer built on Move, the programming language originally developed for financial applications at Meta, bringing licensed payment rails in the U.S., Canada and the EU — the regulated on- and off-ramps that let stablecoins reach fiat. The stack is multi-chain by design: DFNS, which reports securing over €100 billion in assets since 2020, supplies programmable wallet infrastructure so users hold their own keys without managing seed phrases; Circle's CCTP and Tether provide USDC and USDT liquidity. Hesab says it already serves users in more than 160 countries.

'Money should move at the speed of trust. Instantly, without permission, across any border,' Kakar said in the announcement. 'We chose Movement as our exclusive stablecoin settlement layer because it gives us the speed, composability, and emerging-market focus to offer something the world has never had — a bank account that truly belongs to its user.' Movement CEO Torab Torabi framed Hesab as the first major platform on that infrastructure: 'The unbanked aren't waiting for traditional banks to reach them. They're already using mobile money and informal transfer systems. Hesab plugs directly into that demand with something better: their own bank, with no primitive middleman and global access.'

For a company that received a strategic investment from the Algorand Foundation in December 2023 and became the anchor of Algorand's humanitarian-aid story, the choice is a fork in the road — and Algorand community members noticed. On August 14, users on X questioned how the decision had come together; one wrote: 'And it is surprising to me that AF listed HesabPay expansion as one of the priorities in 2026 but we didn't land the deal. Plus Movement is a much smaller chain than Algorand.'

What has not moved is the Afghan wallet itself. HAFN settlement continued on Algorand as of August 21; the UNHCR program announced on July 15 was described by the Algorand Foundation as running on 'the Algorand-powered payments platform'; and the Visa card draws its spending power from the same wallet. The result is a company with one foot on each chain: the rails that made its name — affordable afghani settlement, aid disbursement, bill payments — still settle on Algorand, while the global banking ambition its own press materials now tout points to Movement.

What to Watch

The Kabul launch is a milestone five years in the making and already live for verified users. The honest question it does not answer is where the company's next five years settle. For Algorand, HesabPay remains its most visible proof that blockchain payments can operate at national scale in a cash economy — and the Movement deal is now the most visible proof that even a flagship deployment can build its next act elsewhere.

Source

Source: https://hesab.com/