Visa (NYSE: V) and Lloyds Banking Group have finished a week-long live experiment in using stablecoins for institutional settlement, showing that funds can move across borders far more quickly than on conventional rails—even when banks are closed.
The trial, announced on 30 September 2026, is described as the first of its kind between Visa and a major UK banking group.
Over seven days the two organisations processed a series of real US-dollar settlement obligations totalling $750,000.
Lloyds acquired the USDC through Archax, a UK-regulated digital-asset exchange, booked the transactions via its Corporate Markets operation in Jersey, and sent the tokens to Visa in the United States.
The money arrived in less than an hour, including at weekends.
Settlement is the back-office process in which financial institutions exchange value to complete and reconcile payment activity.
It is distinct from the customer-facing payment itself.
Traditional correspondent-banking arrangements often take a day or longer when a transfer is initiated outside normal business hours.
The pilot suggested that blockchain-based stablecoin transfers can operate around the clock, giving treasurers clearer visibility of when funds will land and reducing the amount of liquidity that must sit idle waiting for settlement windows to open.
The test also explored interoperability.
Lloyds ran its own node on the Canton Network, taking advantage of that chain’s configurable privacy settings, while Visa settled on a separate public blockchain.
The two sides therefore demonstrated that a single settlement flow can span private and public networks.
Peter Left, Head of Digital Assets at Lloyds Banking Group, said the exercise moved the discussion beyond theory: “Settling $750,000 of live payment obligations \ldots has allowed us to test these capabilities in a real-world setting.”
He added that greater certainty over the movement of funds could change how firms manage liquidity, and that interoperability between chains would help digital money scale.
Rob Cameron, Visa’s Group Country Manager for the UK and Ireland, noted that businesses already operate across time zones and weekends, yet the infrastructure that moves money has not always matched that pace.
The pilot, he said, showed stablecoins can sit alongside existing banking systems and give institutions more choice about when and how they settle.
The work forms part of Lloyds’ broader exploration of tokenized money and digital assets. Both firms presented the trial as an incremental step rather than a wholesale replacement of current rails—an attempt to give banks and their corporate clients extra flexibility while preserving the trust and reach of established payment networks.
