Overview
- Lloyds Banking Group and Visa ran a seven-day live pilot that converted $750,000 of real cross-border obligations into USDC for settlement between the two firms.
- Lloyds purchased USDC through UK‑regulated exchange Archax and booked the obligations through its Corporate Markets branch in Jersey before transferring the tokens to Visa in the United States.
- Funds in the pilot reached Visa in under an hour, including transactions executed outside normal banking hours and on weekends, versus the day or more typical of traditional cross-border rails.
- The experiment routed transactions across different blockchain environments, with Lloyds using a Canton Network node and Visa settling on a separate public chain to test interoperability without shared network operation.
- Participants said the pilot focused on interbank settlement mechanics rather than customer payments and that faster, round‑the‑clock settlement could improve treasury visibility and reduce liquidity tied up over weekends and holidays.