Lloyds completes $750,000 cross-border USDC settlement with Visa in pilot test

Lloyds Banking Group has successfully completed its first live pilot of stablecoin settlements with Visa, using the USDC stablecoin to settle $750,000 in payment obligations over a seven-day period. In this test, funds reached Visa in less than an hour—even during weekends—marking a significant improvement in settlement speed when compared to traditional methods.

Streamlining cross-border settlements

Both Lloyds and Visa focused the trial on the settlement layer, rather than direct payment flows, to assess how institutions can move money across borders more rapidly and transparently. Traditionally, cross-border settlements require at least a full business day, and delays often stretch further if processing begins outside standard banking hours.

Lloyds, one of the UK’s major retail banking groups, acquired USDC through Archax, a digital asset exchange regulated in the United Kingdom. Each settlement reflected a genuine payment obligation between Lloyds and Visa, with transactions routed through Lloyds’ Corporate Markets branch located in Jersey before being delivered to Visa in the United States.

The pilot was designed to run stablecoin settlements in parallel with existing processes, providing insights into enhancements in speed, accuracy, and liquidity management. According to Lloyds, using digital assets in real transactions enabled both parties to test technological and operational frameworks in real-world conditions.

Peter Left, Head of Digital Assets at Lloyds Banking Group, emphasized that testing with live obligations moved this project beyond the theoretical stage and allowed teams to assess the technology’s capabilities in actual production-like scenarios.

Interoperability and round-the-clock operations

Lloyds and Visa also tested settlement interoperability between private and public blockchain environments. Lloyds relied on its own node hosted on the Canton network, which supports configurable privacy features, while Visa supported settlement activity on a separate public blockchain.

This setup demonstrated how stablecoin settlements can be conducted across two distinct network types, offering increased flexibility for institutions operating across multiple blockchains and infrastructures. Interoperability between networks became a central focus, especially as institutional liquidity and operational activity increasingly span different chains.

Mini dictionary: Canton is a privacy-enabled blockchain network specifically developed to facilitate the secure transaction and settlement of digital assets among institutional participants.

The ability to settle transactions at any time, including weekends and holidays, can ease liquidity management by reducing the amount of money held in transit. This offers institutions more predictable access to funds, which is particularly important as they navigate multi-currency and multi-market operations.

Stablecoin-based settlements can also provide greater transparency and certainty around transaction timing. Visa’s Group Country Manager for UK and Ireland, Rob Cameron, also highlighted that stablecoins are increasingly able to support existing banking infrastructure, while building out trust and interoperability at scale for financial institutions.

Visa aims to make new forms of digital money practical, interoperable, and trusted at scale, with stablecoins becoming a core area for institutional adoption.

Lloyds confirmed the stablecoin settlement trial forms part of its broader program to explore the use of digital assets and tokenized money in global payment applications.