Lloyds and Visa Settle $750,000 in Cross-Border Payments Using USDC
Lloyds Banking Group and Visa have successfully completed a seven-day live pilot that settled $750,000 in cross-border payment obligations using USDC. The pilot aimed to test the feasibility of using stablecoins for inter-institutional settlement between two financial institutions operating on different blockchain environments.
The practical change was the reduced settlement window, with funds reaching Visa in under an hour, including over weekends and holidays, rather than taking a day or more as is typical with traditional cross-border settlement. The pilot did not alter how customers paid but focused solely on how two financial institutions settled obligations to each other.
The route involved existing banking and payment infrastructure, with USDC added to the institutional settlement process without replacing it. Lloyds used its own node on Canton for one leg of the transaction, while Visa supported settlement on a separate public blockchain. Peter Left, head of digital assets at Lloyds Banking Group, described the pilot as allowing them 'to move beyond theory and test these capabilities in a real-world setting.'