The United Services Automobile Association (USAA) has started a pilot integration scheme with Coinbase, allowing customers to view their Coinbase balance through their USAA account.
USAA is a financial services group that offers banking, investing, and insurance to people and families that serve, or have served, in the United States military.The scheme may provide new opportunities for millions of people.
Connecting USAA and Coinbase accounts
In a support post on their website, Coinbase made this statement, that said that the Coinbase/USAA integration pilot would be available to a select few USAA members:
“USAA's Coinbase pilot uses Coinbase Connect to allow some USAA members to connect their Coinbase account to USAA and view their bitcoin balance on USAA.com and USAA on mobile. The pilot is currently being offered to a limited group of USAA members who were selected at random by USAA.
If you are interested in the pilot, be sure to follow our community thread to stay posted on future developments.”
In a further post on the Coinbase blog, Coinbase showed users how they could connect their USAA and Coinbase accounts:
“We’re excited to announce that USAA has launched a pilot that allows a limited group of USAA members to view their bitcoin balance on USAA.com and the USAA Mobile App. This pilot was rolled out to USAA employees in September and is now being extended to a select group of USAA members.”
“USAA was founded in 1922 by a group of U.S. Army officers that were unable to get auto-insurance because they were deemed to be high-risk by traditional financial service providers. Today, USAA provides insurance, banking, investments, retirement products, and advice to 11.2 million current and former members of the U.S. military and their families. In 2009, Bitcoin was created in the spirit of serving the needs of people that traditional financial services don’t adequately serve. This USAA pilot is another small step in our journey to help bring bitcoin to more people in the U.S..
We’ve enjoyed working with the USAA team so far and look forward to collaborating with them more in the future. If you are interested in learning more about the pilot, please visit here. Don't hesitate to Tweet us or discuss on our Community Forum as well!”
‘Try the new technology’
USAA released information that was slightly different from Coinbase’s statements in that it said, “We’re inviting you to try this new technology… based on your USAA checking account activity… [which] identified you as a possible Coinbase account holder,” as opposed to Coinbase’s claim that it was random. However, fundamentally, the integration process is going smoothly on both sides.
The integration between USAA and Coinbase will allow you to “check your Coinbase account balance in both U.S. Dollars and Bitcoin from usaa.com… Monitor your Coinbase account transactions while you do your day-to-day banking with USAA… [and] get a comprehensive view of your finances in one place.”