Lloyds Completes $750,000 Visa Payment with USDC Stablecoin

Lloyds Banking Group has completed a US$750,000 payment obligation to Visa using the USDC stablecoin in a seven-day trial. The funds arrived at Visa in less than an hour, including over a weekend, beating conventional cross-border settlement times. Lloyds used USDC purchased through Archax, a UK-regulated digital asset exchange, to make the payment. The transaction was booked through Lloyds' Corporate Markets branch in Jersey and sent to Visa in the United States.

The trial connected two different blockchain environments: Lloyds runs its own node on the Canton Network with configurable privacy features, while Visa settled transactions on a separate public blockchain. 'It's allowed us to move beyond the theoretical and to test that capability in real-world conditions,' said Peter Left, Head of Digital Assets at Lloyds Banking Group.

This trial is the first between Visa and a major UK banking group for stablecoin-based settlement. In related news, Lloyds' tenth annual financial institution sentiment survey found that 71% of 100 senior decision-makers expect tokenization to reshape financial services. The biggest benefits cited were faster payments and settlements, and collateral and liquidity management.