Lloyds Banking Group and Visa have completed their first live stablecoin settlement pilot, using USDC to settle $750,000 in cross-border payment obligations.
The seven-day pilot involved real U.S. dollar settlement obligations rather than a laboratory simulation. Lloyds acquired the USDC through UK-regulated digital-asset exchange Archax, booked the settlement volume through its Corporate Markets branch in Jersey, and transferred the funds to Visa in the United States. Funds reached Visa in under one hour, including transactions conducted over the weekend. The companies contrasted that with conventional cross-border settlement, which can take a day or longer when initiated outside normal banking hours.
The trial was described as the first stablecoin settlement test between Visa and a major UK banking group. It also tested interoperability across networks: Lloyds operated its own node on Canton, using configurable privacy capabilities, while Visa supported settlement on a separate public blockchain. The pilot was not a consumer payments rollout. Instead, it focused on whether stablecoins could improve the behind-the-scenes movement of money between financial institutions.
Visa has previously explored USDC settlement, including a 2021 pilot with Crypto.com over Ethereum and a December 2025 expansion in the United States with Cross River Bank and Lead Bank over Solana. At that time, Visa said its stablecoin settlement activity had reached more than $3.5 billion in annualized volume. Lloyds and Visa have not committed to production deployment, but the pilot demonstrates that a regulated bank can acquire USDC, settle live obligations across borders, and complete transfers in under an hour even outside conventional banking hours.
