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A Razer Visa Card is one of those things that’s so over the top that you just have to embrace it. And it’s now a thing, glowing green logo included. Don’t worry about battery life, it apparently only lights up when you make a payment. So, not to doubt your liquidity but the novelty factor will probably wear off after a couple of afternoons spent showing off at Starbucks.
Called simply the Razer Card, this curious thing is only available in Singapore for the time being. Which may seem like a kind of random place for a beta launch of… well, anything. At least from our biased Western perspective. But it really isn’t. It’s just easy to forget Razer has a somewhat uncommon company structure and is dual-headquartered in both California and Singapore.
Looking at a slightly bigger picture, the Razer Card is something between a marketing tool and a celebration of consumerism. Also known as the thing that gave rise to luxury gaming hardware manufacturers such as Razer. So, its newly realized existence isn’t that surprising. Not compared to the fact we haven’t anticipated this exact scenario beforehand. But that just goes to show how incredibly confident Razer is, as both a manufacturer and a brand. This thing just screams “look at me,” daring you to so much as consider pulling it off. In other words: it’s quintessential Razer.
This is not a joke: a Razer Visa Card is meant to underline the firm’s fintech ambitions
That is why one can seriously acknowledge a Razer Visa Card as anything beyond a blunt marketing stunt. Not that Razer would ever agree with that assessment. As starting just over a month ago, it started legitimately signaling intent to reinvent itself as a fintech company. Not just diversify – restructure in a way that would make fintech front and center of its operations. Doable? Sure, theoretically. Realistic? No, not really. But since when was that a requirement for anything Razer does?
Its unapologetic approach to gaming gadgets is actually something you’d expect from a modern fintech startup. The arrogance to claim that you can do something better for long enough to make the most entrenched industry ever feel at least a graze from the invisible hand of the market.
You don’t really hear about new banks cropping up on the regular, aiming to compete with a handful of superpowers holding the majority of everyone’s money and debt. Because it’s a pointless endeavor, unless it’s happening simultaneously with an emergence of a new country. The difference here being is that Singapore is a pretty small pond. One with a remarkable standard of living relative to the majority of the world, but pretty small population-wise.
So, Razer may have gotten signficant enough that it’s allowed to play capitalism with the big boys in a country with a population of Denmark, but its chances of not being eaten alive by the fintech sector in the West aren’t great. For that to become feasible, it needs tech that’s way more meaningful, disruptive, and accessible than what looks like an LED-infused version of Revolut’s own Metal card. The beta version does