It appears to be like Bitpay, the whole article refers to a trusted third party who is processing the two parties.
You deposit money with a third party who transfers funds within their system rather than on Blockchain. There does not seem to be anything new from my point of view.
Bitcoin (deposit)----->Spedn app (processing & exchanging)-----> Market (cash out using paper money)
It's the same as the Coinbase debit card basically, except you use an Iphone app/QR code instead of a plastic card. The other difference is that Visa is accepted everywhere and "Flexa" is obviously not.
The one positive development is that Flexa is cutting out Visa/Mastercard/etc and supposedly offering much lower merchant processing fees than them. Maybe this could be an attractive middleground for merchants to start adopting crypto payments while things like Lightning are still getting off the ground.