Lloyds and Visa settle $750,000 using USDC in seven-day pilot

Lloyds and Visa completed a seven-day live pilot using stablecoins to settle $750,000 in payment obligations between the institutions, rather than payments made by customers. Lloyds described it as the first stablecoin settlement trial between Visa and a major UK banking group. Lloyds purchased USDC through UK-regulated digital asset exchange Archax for a series of U.S. dollar settlements. Lloyds booked the volume through its Corporate Markets branch in Jersey and transferred the funds to Visa in the United States. Lloyds said Wednesday that the funds reached Visa in under an hour, including during the weekend. Lloyds said traditional cross-border settlement can take a day or more when initiated outside banking hours. Lloyds Head of Digital Assets Peter Left said settling live obligations let the institutions test stablecoins in a real-world setting. Lloyds ran its own node on the Canton Network during the trial. Visa supported settlement on a separate, unnamed public blockchain. Visa's stablecoin settlement volume surpassed a $20 billion annualized run rate last month. In April, Visa added Canton and four other blockchains to its settlement pilot, bringing the total to nine. Lloyds was among six major UK banks that began a live pilot of tokenized sterling deposits last year.