Visa and Lloyds Use Stablecoin for Bank-to-Card-Network Settlement
Stablecoins are moving into mainstream bank settlement as Lloyds Banking Group uses stablecoin (USDC) to settle payment obligations with Visa, including over the weekend.
Visa and Lloyds Banking Group have completed a seven-day live pilot using stablecoins to settle $750,000 of payment obligations, with funds reaching Visa in the US in under an hour, including during the weekend.
This is significant because the stablecoin was not being used by a crypto exchange or fintech to move customer money.
It was being used between a major commercial bank and one of the world's largest card networks for institutional settlement.
➡️ The workflow
- Lloyds purchased USDC through Archax, a UK-regulated digital asset exchange.
- The settlement obligation was booked through Lloyds' Corporate Markets branch in Jersey before USDC was transferred to Visa in the US.
That effectively puts stablecoins into the settlement stack connecting:
Commercial bank (Lloyds) → regulated digital-asset infrastructure (Archax) → stablecoin rail (USDC) → global card network (Visa)
And the experiment went beyond settlement speed.
Lloyds operated its own node on Canton Network, while Visa supported settlement on a separate public blockchain, testing how institutional settlement could operate across private and public blockchain environments.
➡️ Bank settlement shift
Stablecoins are increasingly moving from a crypto-native payment rail into the infrastructure used by banks, corporate treasury teams, payment networks and financial institutions to manage liquidity and settle obligations.
For banks, this creates another route toward 24/7 cross-border settlement without requiring every institution to operate on the same blockchain.
For card networks such as Visa, stablecoins can become another settlement asset sitting behind existing payment activity rather than replacing the payment network itself.
For corporate treasury, stablecoins provide a shared external settlement asset outside banking hours with inbuilt cross-chain interoperability.
➡️ Key signal: Stablecoins entering bank-to-card-network settlement can matter far more for institutional adoption than stablecoins being used at the point of sale.
The payment may still look exactly the same to the customer. It is the settlement infrastructure underneath it that is changing.
➡️ And stablecoins are not the only model emerging.
ANZ, Citi, BHP and Swift have separately demonstrated 24/7 interoperable cross-border corporate treasury payment for tokenized deposit under Swift's hub-of-hubs interoperability model.
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