Lloyds, Visa settle $750,000 using USDC in live cross-border pilot

Lloyds and Visa completed a seven-day live pilot using stablecoins to settle $750,000 of payment obligations, in what Lloyds described as the first stablecoin settlement trial between Visa and a major UK banking group.

Lloyds purchased USDC through UK-regulated digital asset exchange Archax for the series of U.S. dollar settlements. The volume was booked through Lloyds' Corporate Markets branch in Jersey and transferred to Visa in the U.S. Funds reached Visa in under an hour, including during the weekend, the bank said Wednesday.

The pilot dealt with settlement between the financial institutions rather than the payments made by customers. Lloyds said traditional cross-border settlement can take a day or more when initiated outside banking hours. "Settling $750,000 of live payment obligations between Lloyds and Visa using stablecoins has allowed us to move beyond theory and test these capabilities in a real-world setting," Lloyds Head of Digital Assets Peter Left said.

Testing settlement across blockchains

Lloyds also ran its own node on the Canton Network during the trial, while Visa supported settlement on a separate, unnamed, public blockchain.

Visa's stablecoin settlement volume surpassed a $20 billion annualized run rate last month. In April, Visa added Canton and four other blockchains to its settlement pilot, taking the total to nine.

Lloyds was among six major UK banks that began a live pilot of tokenized sterling deposits last year.