Axa, Switzerland's largest insurer, will let policyholders pay their premiums with bitcoin. The move represents a milestone in the nascent industry's efforts to gain a foothold in traditional finance.
The French insurer's Swiss arm will begin accepting bitcoin as payment for premiums and other invoices, effective immediately, it said in a statement on Thursday. Axa doesn't plan to hold the cryptocurrency – the only one it is accepting for now.
Instead, Swiss crypto broker Bitcoin Suisse will exchange the digital assets into Swiss francs. Axa doesn't hold any bitcoin on its balance sheet, the company said. The move comes as cryptocurrencies grow in popularity: bitcoin, the world's most commonly-used digital asset, recently hit a new record and currently trades just north of $63,000
Axa is using Inapay, an app for cryptocurrencies, as the go-between to clients. The «bitcoin premium» isn't Axa's only initiative in the blockchain space: the insurer has since 2017 been part of Cardossier, which is developing a transparent data market meant to capture the lifecycle of a vehicle on distributed ledger technology.
