Lloyds Banking Group and Visa have completed a live pilot testing stablecoin-based settlement for cross-border transactions, concluding on September 30, 2026. Over seven days, the two firms processed total obligations of $750,000 using USDC, the dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by Circle.
According to Lloyds, the exercise was not about how payments themselves are made, but about settlement — the internal process through which financial institutions exchange funds to complete and reconcile transactions. As the bank put it, "the pilot project focused on settlement, the internal process by which financial institutions exchange funds to complete and reconcile payment transactions, rather than on how the payments themselves are carried out."
For the test, Lloyds acquired USDC through the crypto exchange Archax. The sum was recorded at the bank's Corporate Markets branch in Jersey before being transferred to Visa in the United States. Lloyds said the pilot showed how settlement built on crypto networks can improve speed and flexibility, "with funds reaching Visa in under an hour, even over the weekend."
The bank contrasted that outcome with conventional processes. "With traditional cross-border payment processes, settlement can take a day or more if initiated outside banking hours," Lloyds said.
Different networks, same settlement window
The two firms used separate infrastructure during the test. Lloyds operated its own node on Canton Network, a blockchain platform with configurable privacy features, while Visa supported settlement on an independent public network.
The pilot forms part of a broader expansion of Visa's Global Stablecoin Settlement Pilot Program. On April 29, 2026, Visa added five networks — Polygon, Base, Arc, Canton and Tempo — bringing the total number of networks accepted in the pilot from four to nine. Before that expansion, the program accepted Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche and Stellar.
Scale of Visa's stablecoin push
Visa's stablecoin settlement activity has grown quickly since the program's inception. The company's pilot reached an annualized rate of $7 billion in the first quarter of 2026, a figure that underscores the pace at which major payment networks are testing stablecoin rails alongside traditional settlement infrastructure.
For Lloyds, one of the UK's largest banking groups, the Jersey-based test marks a concrete step into stablecoin settlement trials, adding a European institution to a list of partners exploring how tokenised dollar instruments might compress settlement times that have long been constrained by banking hours and time zones.
