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During the seven-day pilot, Lloyds used USDC, a dollar-pegged stablecoin, to settle obligations totalling $750,000 with Visa. According to its September 30 announcement, funds arrived in under an hour, including over the weekend.
Lloyds bought the USDC through Archax and booked the settlements through its Corporate Markets branch in Jersey before sending funds to Visa in the US. These were institutional transfers, so the pilot changed how the bank met its obligations to Visa without requiring customers to pay in crypto.
A card approval comes before settlement
A card approval tells a shopper that a purchase can proceed. The institutions handling that purchase still have to calculate and settle the resulting obligations, which is where a different way of transferring funds can become useful.
Consider a hypothetical $100 purchase
A shopper pays $100 with a Visa card, and the issuing bank approves the purchase. The financial institutions involved still need to settl...
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