Absa Seychelles Rolls Out Multi-Currency Virtual Card for Travel and Online Spend

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📷 Photo: Absa Bank Seychelles via Facebook

VICTORIA, Seychelles, Absa Bank Seychelles on Tuesday unveiled a multi-currency prepaid card that lives entirely inside its mobile banking app, giving customers up to five separate currency wallets on a single digital product. The launch is timed for the country’s 50th Independence anniversary and marks the most aggressive digital push by a local bank in 2026.

The product was introduced at an event led by Murugan Pillay, who runs personal and private banking at Absa Seychelles, while digital product manager Patrick Hoareau walked attendees through the user experience. Pillay framed the launch as the latest stage in a six-decade shift in how Seychellois handle money: from cash, to embossed plastic, to internet banking, to phone-led tap-and-pay. The new virtual card extends that arc by removing plastic from the picture almost entirely.

Once logged in, customers can generate a card in any of five currencies: the Seychelles Rupee, US Dollar, Euro, British Pound, and South African Rand. The app lets them build up to twenty-five cards in total, enough to dedicate one to each major spending category, from streaming services to overseas subscriptions. Each card draws on a wallet funded from a linked Absa current, savings, or credit account, with a SCR 10 minimum top-up.

The card builds on Absa Pay, rolled out in December 2025 to let Android phones act as tap-and-pay terminals at physical merchants. Where Absa Pay still needed a physical card behind the scenes, the new product operates as a pure digital wallet. Android users can use it at point-of-sale terminals and online, while iPhone users can currently use it for online, in-app, and subscription payments. Absa says broader iPhone functionality is on the way.

Hoareau, in his walkthrough, stressed that the setup is intentionally short. Inside the app, a customer chooses a currency, accepts the terms, names the card, and tops it up. Live exchange rates appear on screen before any conversion is confirmed, and transfers between currency wallets are immediate. Users can also reset the PIN, hide or expose the card number, and route unused balances back to a primary account without contacting the bank.

For travellers, the practical effect is fewer cash movements and fewer overseas accounts. Customers can lock in favourable rates by loading foreign currency when the rate is good, then spend it later without further conversion. Absa representatives described the product as a budgeting tool as much as a payment one, since tying a card to a single purpose makes it easier to track and cap that expense.

Risk is contained by design. The cards sit as prepaid wallets, so a breach exposes only the loaded balance, not the underlying bank account. Customers can freeze, unfreeze, block, or cancel a card from the app within seconds. If a compromise is detected, the balance can be transferred back to the main account or recovered onto a replacement card. Disputed sums tied to verified fraud are refunded once the bank completes its checks.

Pillay positioned the launch within Absa’s wider sustainability and innovation agenda, noting that removing plastic from the issuance chain supports environmental targets while improving customer experience. A future phase will extend the same framework to business and corporate clients.

The Seychelles rollout mirrors a wider pattern inside the Absa group. Sister operations in Mauritius, Uganda, and Botswana already offer multi-currency cards, and Seychelles is now the first island market in the group to do so. The local regulator has prepared the ground through the National Payment System (Electronic Money) Regulations, 2022, and the Central Bank of Seychelles continues to lower merchant service charges and to keep the local Seychelles Electronic Fund Transfer (SEFT) rails free for customers.

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Source: SN

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