Visa Flex Credential Is Expanding Across CEMEA. It Has Been Live There Since 2024.

Visa, the credit infrastructure firm _able and the pan-African payments network Onafriq announced a partnership on 20 August to support the expansion of Visa Flex Credential across Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The release runs to 646 words before the boilerplate. It names three executives and no banks, no countries and no dates. Here is what is in it, and what was already true before it.

What the release states

The collaboration was signed the day it was announced. Visa Flex Credential lets an issuer put several funding sources behind a single card credential, so a cardholder can pay from a debit balance, a credit line, a prepaid balance or instalments without carrying separate cards.

Under the agreement, Onafriq will provide payment processing for eligible prepaid card implementations and connect participating institutions to its pan-African infrastructure. _able supplies the credit enablement layer and the tooling issuers use to manage portfolio performance, risk and liquidity. Financial institutions across the region "can now explore opportunities" to apply Flex Credential to their existing card portfolios.

Jad Abbas, co-founder and chief financial officer of _able, gave the clearest statement of the problem being addressed: "Most consumers across this region already hold a card, and very few can access credit through it."

What it does not state

No participating bank or issuer is named. No country or market is identified. There is no launch date, no pilot window and no phasing. There are no figures of any kind — not cards, customers, volumes or credit limits. Commercial terms and the credit underwriting model are not described.

Across those 646 words we counted 28 conditional or intent constructions — "may be able to," "intended to," "designed to," "aims to," "helps," "supports," "explore" — or about one every twenty-three words.

This is not unusual for a payments partnership announcement, and it is not evidence that nothing is happening. It does mean that a reader trying to work out what changes, for whom, and when, will not find the answer in the document.

The genuinely new part is the word prepaid

One clause carries more weight than the rest. Onafriq's role is processing for eligible prepaid card implementations.

That matters because of what card portfolios in much of Africa look like. The release itself makes the point: debit and prepaid adoption has grown substantially while access to formal credit has not. Prepaid is often the credential a customer already holds, and prepaid programmes are the ones a mobile money operator or a fintech can issue without a full credit licence.

Attaching a credit funding source to a prepaid credential, processed by a network that already reaches across African markets, is a different proposition from adding a credit line to an existing credit card. Whether it works will depend on underwriting and on local regulation, neither of which the release addresses. But it is the part of the announcement that is not simply a restatement of the product.

Flex Credential in CEMEA is not new

The framing of "expansion across CEMEA" invites the reading that the product is arriving in the region. Visa's own materials say otherwise.

Visa's developer documentation lists the regional availability of Visa Flex Credential as North America, Asia-Pacific, Europe, CEMEA and Latin America and the Caribbean — that is, all five of its regions. The product page offers two deployment models, VFC Managed and VFC Self-Serve, and five families of APIs covering relationship management, rules, authorisation decisions, transaction search and notifications.

More concretely, Visa announced a live CEMEA deployment nearly two years ago. In a release dated 12 November 2024, Visa said Liv, the digital bank launched by Emirates NBD, was the first digital bank in the Middle East and North Africa to debut Visa Flex Credential, letting customers hold five currency accounts — US dollar, sterling, euro, Canadian dollar and Australian dollar — behind a single card. The United Arab Emirates sits inside CEMEA.

The product was unveiled in May 2024, and one of the venues where Visa presented it was its own Visa Payments Forum CEMEA. The gap between the first publicly named CEMEA issuer and this week's CEMEA expansion announcement is twenty-one months.

What the product has actually done

The deployment record Visa publishes is short but real. Flex Credential launched first in Japan, powering Sumitomo Mitsui Card Company's Olive card. By November 2024, Visa reported more than three million Olive cardholders using it and said 70% of them moved between debit, credit and prepaid funding sources. A Sumitomo Mitsui executive is quoted on Visa's product page saying more than one million accounts were opened in the first six months.

In the United States, the first deployment was the Affirm Card, which Visa said was used by over 1.4 million consumers at the time of the November 2024 announcement.

Those are the named, numbered deployments in Visa's public materials: Japan, the United States, and the UAE. The announcement this week adds a signed agreement and a processing route, not a fourth.

The demand evidence is four years old and from another region

Visa's product page for Flex Credential carries three statistics: 84% of users intend to use virtual accounts and digital apps as their primary means for flexible payment accounts, 51% report strong appeal for streamlined access to multiple accounts, and 82% are likely to open new cards or accounts with a single bank.

The footnote attached to all three reads: "Sourced from Visa Flex Account Consumer Research Conducted November 2022: Consumer evaluation of Flex Consumer Value Proposition to support Visa's pitch to Issuers (AP Markets only)."

The research is from November 2022, it covers Asia-Pacific markets only, and Visa describes its purpose as supporting a pitch to issuers. None of that makes the numbers wrong. It does mean the published consumer demand evidence for a product now being extended across Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa was collected somewhere else, four years ago, for a sales conversation.

What is established and what is not

Established: Visa, _able and Onafriq announced a signed collaboration on 20 August 2026 covering CEMEA. Onafriq will process eligible prepaid implementations; _able provides credit enablement. The release names no issuer, market, date or figure. Visa's developer documentation lists CEMEA among five regions where Flex Credential is available. Visa announced Liv, of Emirates NBD in the UAE, as a live CEMEA deployment on 12 November 2024, alongside the Affirm Card in the United States, and reported over three million Olive cardholders in Japan with 70% switching funding sources. The three consumer statistics on Visa's product page are footnoted to November 2022 research in Asia-Pacific markets.

Not established: which institutions, if any, have committed; when anything goes live; how credit extended over a prepaid credential will be underwritten, priced or regulated in any specific market; how many CEMEA issuers use Flex Credential today, which Visa does not publish; and whether Onafriq's processing role is exclusive or one route among several. We asked none of the three companies for comment before publication.

The narrow reading is that three companies signed an agreement to make an existing product easier to deploy on a card type that is common in African markets, and described it in language that leaves every operational question open.