Lloyds Banking Group settled $750,000 of real payment obligations with Visa using USDC over a seven-day live pilot, with the funds arriving in under an hour, the bank said on Thursday.
Lloyds bought the stablecoin through Archax, a UK-regulated digital asset exchange. The money was booked through its Corporate Markets branch in Jersey and sent to Visa in the United States, including transfers made over the weekend.
That was the point of the exercise. Cross-border settlement outside normal banking hours usually takes a day or more, Lloyds said, and the test was about how institutions square up with each other rather than how customers pay.
Lloyds ran its own node on the Canton Network, using its privacy features, while Visa settled on a separate public blockchain it did not name. Peter Left, the bank’s head of digital assets, said using live obligations moved the work beyond theory.
Lloyds called it the first stablecoin settlement trial between Visa and a major UK banking group. For Visa it is one more partner in a programme that already spans nine blockchains, and its stablecoin settlement passed a $20 billion annualised run rate last month, according to The Block.
For Lloyds it sits beside a different bet. The bank was one of six large UK lenders that began piloting tokenised sterling deposits last year, the bank-issued cousin of a stablecoin.
The open questions are scale and currency. The pilot ran in dollars rather than sterling, it was small, and neither company said whether it becomes a standing arrangement or what volume would justify one.
