Visa launching internal stablecoin platform for clients that provides access to OUSD: report

Visa, the payment processor with over 200 million merchant clients, is launching an internal platform designed to make it easier for banks and fintechs to "handle stablecoins," according to Fortune.

The company did not provide details on when the platform will become available.

Visa will launch the new platform with the Open Standard (OUSD) stablecoin, the report said. OUSD is expected by many industry watchers to become a major competitor to Circle's USDC, the dominant stablecoin in the United States.

The OUSD stablecoin is supposed to launch later this year. Last month, over 140 companies — including Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, BlackRock and Coinbase — announced they planned to launch OUSD, a stablecoin meant to share most of the earnings it collects from holding reserves. Businesses will be able to mint and redeem Open USD without fees or volume limits.

Visa already also supports Circle's (USDC) and Paxos' USDG.

"It’s less about accessing stablecoins and more about how… this interoperate[s] with their treasury settlement, their money movement workflows, [and] their existing bank setups," Visa's Global Head of Growth, Rubail Birwadker told Fortune.

Last month, Visa publicly discussed how stablecoins are reshaping the global payments infrastructure.

"AI is transforming the front end of commerce. Stablecoins are reshaping the back end," said Visa's Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell. "Visa's role is to enable it to work securely, reliably and at global scale, for every participant in the ecosystem."