The Hi card promises a fee-free virtual Mastercard tied to your IBAN, but the public pages disclose almost nothing and its users rate it 1.8

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

The Hi card is a virtual Mastercard debit card that sits on top of an IBAN account in euros or pounds, and it can also be paid from crypto you hold inside the Hi app. That is the whole pitch in one sentence, and it is an appealing one: a card that spends your normal bank balance, in a wallet that also holds digital assets, with third-party reporting that it charges nothing for transactions, currency exchange or issuance.

I went through the card’s own public pages and help material, worked through what it actually says against what it does not say, and read the user reports. My score is 4.9 out of 10. That is not a scolding — it is what happens when a product’s marketing is clear and its documentation is not. Almost every number you would want before signing up — the countries, the fees, the ATM, the limits, the identity checks — is absent from the official pages. Where I do have figures, they come from Trustpilot reviews and 2022 press coverage, and I will tell you when that is the case.

Who does this suit? If you are already inside the Hi app in Europe, spending from an IBAN in EUR or GBP, and you want one more virtual card without a monthly bill, the fit is plausible. Who does it not suit? Anyone whose spending depends on a cash machine, on Apple Pay or Google Pay, on a physical card in a wallet, or on knowing what a payment costs before they make it. That is not a small group. It is most people who need a card to be a card.

The conditions described here are current as of October 28, 2026.

The score, criterion by criterion

The single highest mark is Cost, and it is the one I trust least. A card that publishes no fees at all cannot really be scored 8 out of 10 for cost; it can only be scored on what third parties report plus the absence of any disclosed charge. Eight is generous for an unverified claim, and I would rather you read that mark as “possibly excellent, entirely unconfirmed” than as a promise. Reliability and everyday use are the marks that should decide it for most people, and both are low.

Will They Give You the Card?

Here is the first thing to understand: the official page does not name a single country it is available in. The only starting data is the EEA. That is an unusually thin answer to a basic question, and it matters, because your question is almost certainly not “is this in the EEA” but “is this where I live”.

Unofficial information fills some of the gap. At launch in 2022 the card was offered to members in more than 25 EEA countries and the UK, according to Mastercard and press coverage from that year. Later, according to user reports on Trustpilot, the UK left the programme and members there were told to withdraw. So the honest summary is: broadly European at the start, changing since, and never confirmed in writing on the card’s own pages.

You will also notice that nobody tells you what happens if you live somewhere unusual. There is no published list to check yourself against, which means the only reliable test is to install the app and see whether it opens a path to a card for you. If you are in a country with tight capital controls or a difficult relationship with card issuers, that is a two-minute check worth doing before you move any money.

Age and documents are in the same category of silence. The card’s page says details must be checked before use and that once your address is verified, you can activate the card. Which documents are needed, and what age you must be, is not stated. The help centre does have an “Identity verification (KYC)” collection of articles, where the detail is held.

How to Get It

The route is the app. You verify your address, and the card appears in the Card section of the Hi app, where you activate it. That is the whole sequence the official material describes.

What you get is a virtual debit card. The card page says virtual debit cards are now available, with an article dated 30 June 2026. A physical card is not stated on this page, and I would read that as “virtual only for now.” The help centre’s English and French versions of the card materials use “now available” language that suggests a change.

Where it works is the one strong claim: Mastercard acceptance, which the card page puts at more than 90 million merchants. That is the network’s global acceptance figure, not Hi’s own, and it does not guarantee that any particular merchant will accept a virtual card — see the section on why prepaid and foreign cards sometimes fail.

To be clear about what is not here: there is no application form, no eligibility page, no waiting time, no mention of an invitation, and no statement of what happens to an application that is refused. If you have applied and heard nothing, the card’s public pages will not explain the delay to you.

Fees: What It Really Costs

The honest answer to “what does Hi cost” is that the official pages do not say. No pricing is published. But you can still plan, and you can still check, because the fee picture for a card like this has a predictable shape, and third-party reporting fills in part of it.

Unofficial sources — an undated blog review, not Hi — say there are no transaction fees, no foreign exchange fees and no issuance fee, and that issuance is free for eligible users who complete KYC, with fees possibly applying later. Read that as a snapshot, not a promise. The word “later” in that sentence is doing a lot of work.

Here is what is published and what is not, item by item:

That last row is the one thing you can build a plan on. You spend euros or pounds, whichever your IBAN is in. If the balance runs out, you top up or switch to the other secondary currency.

Now the two everyday payments I would run through.

A coffee in the same currency, from your IBAN. If your IBAN is in euros and you buy a coffee in the eurozone, the transaction runs on your IBAN funds in EUR and there is no currency conversion in the way at all. On the unofficial “no fees” reading, the coffee costs exactly its price. This is the payment Hi is best at, and it is also the least interesting one.

A hotel in a currency your IBAN does not hold. Your balance is in euros and the hotel bills in dollars. Something has to happen: either your bank converts at its own rate, or the card converts. What rate, and what the conversion is called, is not stated. This is the payment where “no FX fees” either means nothing or means everything, and you cannot tell which from the public pages. Ask support in writing and keep the answer.

Spending your crypto balance instead. The card can also pay from crypto held at Hi. What you pay is the crypto converted into your card currency, and again the rate and any fee are not stated. There is no published list of which coins or which networks are involved.

The one number that is genuinely reassuring is the merchant-acceptance one: over 90 million places. If the fee is zero, the coffee is exactly a coffee.

One thing I would add, from the wider category rather than from Hi: blockchain network fees for a deposit are charged by the blockchain, not by the card provider. If you fund from crypto, the network’s own fee is on top of anything Hi charges, and it is not in any table above because it is not the card’s fee.

Top Up: How the Card Gets Money

The funding model is the part of Hi I find most coherent, and it is worth understanding before anything else.

By default the card is linked to your personal IBAN, in EUR or GBP. Transactions are covered by your IBAN funds. In effect, this is a debit card on your bank account wearing a crypto app’s interface. You are not converting anything to use it; you are just paying from money you already have.

There is a second mode: you can also pay with crypto held at Hi. Here one secondary currency at a time applies, and you set it in the app under secondary payment currency. So your card is denominated in one currency at a time, and if the balance runs out, you top up or change that secondary currency.

That is the honest extent of it. Which coins are supported, on which networks, is not stated. How long a deposit takes, whether there is a minimum, whether withdrawals are possible and on what terms — none of that is stated either. “How to withdraw money from Hi” is one of the most-typed searches about cards like this, and the public pages do not answer it.

For you as a customer, that means two questions you have to ask before you commit anything: which token and which network, and how do I get money back out. Both are answers only Hi support can give you, and you should get them in writing before a transfer, not after.

Paying With It Every Day

Virtual only, Mastercard network, EUR or GBP. That is the daily experience in three phrases, and the gaps are where this card gets uncomfortable.

Wallets are not stated. Apple Pay and Google Pay are not named on the official pages. In reviews, users reported Google Pay not working. If your habit is tapping your phone, this is not a solved problem here, and “not stated” plus a user report of failure is not the same as “not available” — but it is certainly not “works”.

Cash machines are not disclosed. Nothing on the ATM fee or on whether withdrawals are possible at all. For anyone who still needs cash, that is a dealbreaker you cannot argue your way past.

Rewards are promised but not quantified. The card page says users can earn rewards in cryptocurrency with the card. No rate, no conditions, no cap. Unofficial 2022 launch coverage put it at 1–10% back depending on tier. Unofficial, two years older than the article I am reviewing, and contradicted in practice by user reports of cashback being cut, for example from 8% to 1% in July 2023.

The app itself. The card lives in the Hi app, in its Card section. I could not identify the app listing through an App Store search, so I cannot give you a rating or a sense of how well it is maintained. That is a small thing that turned into a real gap: the app is the product.

Dispute handling is not stated. If a payment goes wrong — goods not received, a duplicate charge, a fraud claim — nothing on the public pages describes the process. From the wider category: a chargeback is a refund ordered by the issuer, and prepaid-card protection varies by scheme and should not be assumed to apply.

None of this is disqualifying on its own. It is just the reality of spending money on a card whose everyday behaviour is undocumented.

What Can Go Wrong

This is where I have to be blunt, because the complaints are the most concrete thing I found.

Trustpilot shows 1.8 out of 5 from 587 reviews, with only one review in the last twelve months. A large body of reviews and a very low mark is a specific kind of signal: many people tried it, and most of them are unhappy. The themes users report, from 2022 to 2025:

• Withdrawal and UK exit problems in 2023–24, after members were reportedly told to withdraw by January.
• Rewards cuts and tier changes in 2022–23, including cashback dropping from 8% to 1%.
• Card blocked for a duration with Google Pay not working, August to September 2023.
• Losses on the HI token, and allegations of a rug pull, 2023–25.

None of this is a court finding and I am not presenting it as one. It is a consistent, repeated pattern in public user reports, and it is exactly the pattern you would expect from a product whose rewards and token value are tied to a single company’s own ecosystem and whose membership tiers can change.

The company picture is also worth assembling carefully, because the official page is silent. Starting data names hi Technology Limited. Press from 2022 reported that the card was issued by Moorwand Ltd, a Mastercard principal member, with a Contis partnership announced for the debit card and fiat accounts. So there are several companies in this arrangement, and the one that holds your card programme may not be the one whose app you installed. That is normal in this industry, and it is also why you should work out who actually issues your card before you trust anyone with money.

Two more structural risks from the wider category that apply here:

Programme closure. Card programmes do get shut down. Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022 and the FTX US debit card was wound down. WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all its Visa programmes. The pattern in a closure is always the same: a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then users are asked to withdraw what is left. That last step is the one that hurts.

Merchant declines. A card number’s first 6 or 8 digits identify the issuing institution, and merchants can look that up. If the issuer country differs from your billing address, a shop may apply extra scrutiny or decline the payment outright — which is why prepaid and foreign cards sometimes fail where an ordinary domestic card sails through. Address Verification Service, which compares the street number and postal code you typed with the issuer’s records, is mostly unavailable for foreign-issued cards, and that alone can cause declines.

On security specifics and support, the honest answer is the same as everywhere else on this card’s pages: security measures are not stated, and the help centre has a “Contact hi” collection whose channels, languages and hours I did not read. It is published in English and French.

If you read the Trustpilot page yourself, do it with the dates attached. Most of what people are angry about happened in 2023 and 2024, and some of it is about a market exit rather than about the card failing.

Alternatives

If the Hi card’s core idea appeals — spend from a crypto balance through a normal card network — the same idea exists elsewhere, and two of the alternatives I checked publish their numbers. Both scored higher than Hi.

International Visa Card — 6.7 / 10. A US-issued Platinum Visa card, virtual, paying in USD, with a physical card listed as “Coming soon”. Availability is the striking part: the account and card are not available to residents or legal registrants of Belarus, mainland China, North Korea, Cuba, India, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam, with FATF grey-list countries reviewed case by case, and purchases blocked in North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Russia, Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela. The rule follows residence or registration, not citizenship. Costs are clear: virtual card issuance $5 one-time, no maintenance fee, and plans of Classic free, Pro $9.00/month and Max $19.00/month. Card use in USD is free on all plans; foreign currency costs the “Visa exchange rate + 2% FX fee”; deposits of any kind are free. You fund with USDC or USDT into the USD account at 1:1, and also by USD, EUR, SEPA, SWIFT or FedNow. No cashback is stated. The excluded-country list is long, so check it before anything else.

UNi Card — 6.1 / 10. A multicurrency card on the Mastercard network, spending from the UNi.Global account balance; whether it is physical or virtual is not stated, and eligibility is not stated either. The fee story is the strongest of the three: “No annual fee or foreign transaction fee”, assets converted at “live OTC (Over-the-Counter) rates”, and “No hidden exchange fees”. It offers “Spend-to-Earn rewards” up to 3%. Funding is not stated, which is the gap here.

Morse — 7.5 / 10. The highest of the three, and the most detailed about who it serves. Eligibility is by residence, not citizenship: at least 18, resident in a supported country, with the app available in over 140 countries and local add and withdraw in over 70. It cannot serve customers subject to US sanctions (also UK, EU, UN). A long list of countries — American Samoa, Australia, Cape Verde, Guernsey, Hong Kong SAR China, Isle of Man, Japan, Jersey, New Zealand, Serbia, Singapore, Switzerland, Thailand, Türkiye, United Kingdom and Western Sahara — was in closed beta needing an invite code, and the card is “available only in certain countries” with the list not published on the card page. The card is “fully virtual for now”: a Visa prepaid debit spending from Morse Balance in any currency. Issuance and monthly fees are not stated, only “Fees may apply. See Cardholder Agreement”. What is stated is good: “Zero foreign exchange fees or markups” at the real-time Visa rate, conversions at the real rate “with no markup”, and “Paying with the Morse Card, online and contactless, is free”. Funding includes debit card, stablecoin transfer and Account Details in USD, EUR, MXN and COP (BRL needs a Brazilian CPF); USDC, USDG and EURC via Solana are free while other tokens and blockchains carry a fee; the Morse Wallet is self-custodial.

The pattern across all four is the same: virtual only, one or two currencies, and eligibility decided by residence rather than citizenship. That is the category, not a quirk of any one card.

Who I Would Recommend It To

I would recommend the Hi card to someone already inside the Hi app in Europe, spending euros or pounds from their own IBAN, who wants an extra virtual Mastercard and has verified for themselves that the app offers them one. For that person the setup is coherent, the merchant acceptance is the network’s, and the third-party reports say the cost is nothing.

I would not recommend it as a first card, a primary card, or a card for someone who needs cash, mobile wallets, published limits, published fees or a published list of eligible countries. If any of those matter to you, Morse or the International Visa Card publish more, and the UNi Card publishes the clearest fee statement of all four.

And I would hold one rule for yourself regardless of which you choose: get the answers in writing before the first transfer. For Hi that means which token, which network, what it costs, and how money comes back out. For anything in this category that means the same thing, because the pattern of programmes closing is long and well documented, and the people caught by it are almost always the ones who assumed the answers were obvious.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Hi card?

The Hi card is a virtual Mastercard debit card that draws on your personal IBAN in euros or pounds, and that can also pay from crypto held inside the Hi app. You manage it from the Card section of that app. The card’s own page says virtual debit cards are now available, and points to Mastercard acceptance at more than 90 million merchants.

How does the Hi card work?

By default the card is linked to your IBAN, and purchases are covered by those bank funds in EUR or GBP, so it behaves like an ordinary debit card on your account. Alternatively you can pay from crypto held at Hi, with one secondary currency set in the app. Which coins and networks are involved is not stated on the public pages.

Is Hi a bank?

No — not on the public evidence. The card is issued by an issuer under Mastercard’s licence, with press from 2022 naming Moorwand Ltd as issuer and a Contis partnership for the debit card and fiat accounts, while the brand is hi Technology Limited. In the EU the issuing institution would typically be an electronic money institution, which can issue e-money and payment cards but cannot lend.

Who owns Hi?

The starting data names hi Technology Limited as the company behind the app. The card programme itself sat with a separate issuer, reported in 2022 press coverage as Moorwand Ltd, a Mastercard principal member, alongside a Contis partnership. The official card page is silent on all of this, so the structure is reconstructed from press rather than read off the site.

Which countries can get the Hi card?

The official page names no countries; the only starting data is the EEA. Unofficial reporting from the 2022 launch says 25+ EEA countries plus the UK, and user reports say the UK later exited and members were told to withdraw. There is no published eligibility list to check yourself against, so the app is the only real test.

Does the Hi card require KYC?

Identity verification is required before the card is activated — the page says that once your address is verified you can activate the card in the app. Which documents are needed and what age you must be is not stated. A help centre collection on “Identity verification (KYC)” exists, so the detail likely lives there rather than on the card page.

How much does the Hi card cost?

The card publishes no fees at all — no issuance, monthly, transaction, conversion, FX, ATM or limit figures. Unofficial sources report no transaction, FX or issuance fees and free issuance after KYC, with fees possibly applying later. Treat that as a snapshot from a third party rather than a commitment from Hi.

Is the Hi card safe?

“Safe” depends on what you mean. No security measures are published on the card pages, and user reports on Trustpilot include a card blocked for a duration, Google Pay not working, and allegations of fraud and a rug pull. The issuer safeguarding customer funds is a question for support, and fund segregation is not the same as a bank deposit guarantee.

How do I top up the Hi card?

You do not need to top it up in the usual sense if you use it as an IBAN-linked card: transactions simply draw on your bank balance. To pay from crypto instead, you hold assets in the Hi app and set a secondary payment currency. Coins, networks, minimums and timing for a crypto deposit are all not stated.

Is the Hi card worth it?

Worth it as a spare virtual card if you already use the Hi app and spend in euros or pounds from your own IBAN. Not worth it as your only card, or if you need cash, Apple Pay or Google Pay, published limits, or a clear statement of what a payment costs. Its Trustpilot mark of 1.8 from 587 reviews is the fact I weigh most heavily.

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