Visa and Lloyds settle 750,000 US dollars in stablecoin over seven days in the scheme's first trial with a major UK bank

Lloyds Banking Group and Visa said on 30 September 2026 that they had completed a seven-day live pilot in which Lloyds used stablecoins to settle 750,000 US dollars of payment obligations with Visa, with funds arriving in under an hour including over a weekend. The flow ran from Lloyds' Corporate Markets branch in Jersey through Archax, a UK-regulated digital-asset infrastructure provider, onto the USDC rail and on to Visa in the United States.

Lloyds ran its own node on the Canton Network, a blockchain built for regulated capital markets, while Visa took settlement on a separate public chain, so the pilot tested interoperability between a permissioned and a public environment rather than a single rail. Both sides describe it as a pilot of settlement - the leg where institutions exchange funds - and not of the payment itself, with no deployment timeline given.

Peter Left, head of digital assets at Lloyds, and Rob Cameron, Visa's group country manager for UK and Ireland, were named on the announcement.

Settlement is the part of the card chain that still keeps banking hours, and that is a working-capital cost acquirers and their merchants carry rather than a technical curiosity: funds initiated outside those hours can take a day or more. A scheme settling with a major UK bank in under an hour across a weekend puts a number on what removing that constraint looks like, and it extends the pattern the corpus already records on the Mastercard side with Circle in EEMEA from an enablement announcement to a measured run.

The caveats are what hold the score down: 750,000 dollars over seven days is a test, the corridor is Jersey to the United States rather than intra-European, and nothing about merchant funding changes yet.

• Whether Visa extends stablecoin settlement to European acquirers rather than issuers, and in euro rather than dollars
• Whether Lloyds takes it beyond the Jersey branch
• Whether settlement timing starts appearing in acquirer funding terms, which is where a merchant would first notice

• pymnts.com
• The Paypers, 30 September 2026, on the Archax and Canton detail