Visa pilots stablecoin prefunding model for faster international payouts

Global payments giant Visa has unveiled a new pilot program designed to fundamentally upgrade the speed and efficiency of cross-border money movement. Announced at SIBOS 2025, the initiative allows financial institutions, banks, and remittance providers to use stablecoins to prefund payments on its real-time payments platform, Visa Direct.

Traditionally, settling international transfers has been a slow and costly process, forcing companies to park large fiat balances with banking partners well in advance to cover outgoing payments. This practice ties up capital for days, creating a problem known as “payment float” and hindering efficient treasury operations.

The Stablecoin Solution:

With the new model, participating institutions can prefund Visa Direct with stablecoins, such as USDC, instead of locking up fiat currency. Visa treats these stablecoins as “money in the bank,” making the funds instantly available for payouts across its global network.

The key benefits of this approach are:

• Liquidity Unlocked: Businesses can free up working capital by moving money in minutes rather than days, improving cash management.
• Modernized Treasury: It provides a dynamic, 24/7 system that offers more flexibility and responsiveness compared to legacy banking cutoffs.
• Predictability: Using a stablecoin as a consistent settlement layer reduces exposure to local currency volatility.

Crucially, the end-recipients will still receive their payments in local fiat currency, ensuring the familiarity of traditional banking while the back-end infrastructure is modernized. By combining the scale of its global network with the speed of blockchain technology, Visa’s pilot signals a major step toward stablecoins becoming the default digital rail for enterprise-level cross-border finance.

The Visa story is a clear signal that stablecoins are moving past the crypto trading desks and into the core of global commerce. But what exactly are they?

Stablecoins are a class of cryptocurrency designed to solve the primary drawback of assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum: volatility. As their name suggests, they aim to maintain a stable value, typically by pegging their price to a familiar, less volatile asset—most commonly the U.S. dollar, at a 1:1 ratio.

They are digital tokens issued on a decentralized blockchain network, offering the benefits of crypto—such as speed, security, and programmability—without the price risk.

The most dominant type of stablecoin is fiat-backed (or fully reserved). These coins are backed one-to-one by high-quality, liquid assets—like cash, cash equivalents, or short-term government securities—held in reserve by the issuer. This reserve backing ensures that the coin’s value remains pegged to the reference currency, allowing it to function as a reliable medium of exchange and store of value.

For businesses, especially those operating internationally, stablecoins represent a significant infrastructure upgrade over legacy financial systems. The benefits extend far beyond just avoiding volatility: they unlock liquidity, reduce operating costs, and enable new forms of automated finance.

The Liquidity & Treasury Revolution

The most immediate benefit, highlighted by the Visa pilot, is the end of “payment float”. This is achieved through instant settlement and superior capital management.

Traditional bank transfers and wires can take days to settle, often operating only during business hours. In sharp contrast, stablecoin payments settle in minutes, operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. This instantaneous process of unlocking working capital means that money is no longer trapped for days in transit, allowing treasury teams to achieve highly accurate cash forecasting and maintain significantly lower cash reserves, with the freed-up capital available for immediate reinvestment.

Furthermore, multinational companies can achieve optimized global cash management by instantly moving money between international subsidiaries to rebalance global cash positions on the fly, effectively eliminating delays caused by different time zones and bank cutoff times.

Reduced Costs and Cross-Border Efficiency

For frequent international payers, stablecoins dramatically slash the costs and complexity associated with traditional cross-border rails.

By cutting out multiple correspondent banks and intermediaries, stablecoin transfers result in lower transaction fees, often proving significantly cheaper than wires or credit card processing. The use of a single, pegged digital currency also provides a way to achieve minimized FX risk and fees: stablecoins allow a business to transact globally in a digital U.S. dollar (or Euro) equivalent, helping them manage foreign exchange volatility or simplify the FX process (e.g., Fiat A to Stablecoin to Fiat B). Finally, because stablecoins operate over the internet, not through exclusive banking corridors, they offer a vast global reach and accessibility, lowering the barrier to entry for merchants and contractors in underbanked regions worldwide.

Compliance and Programmability

Stablecoins, when utilized via compliant platforms, offer advanced features that streamline operational and financial compliance.

Every stablecoin transaction is recorded on a public, immutable blockchain, providing enhanced transparency and audit trails and a single source of truth for all payment data. This simplifies reconciliation and aids in faster, more efficient auditing and accounting. Perhaps most innovatively, the payments themselves can be made “programmable” through automated compliance with smart contracts. These self-executing contracts can be used to embed compliance controls directly into the payment process—for example, automatically holding or refusing a payment if the recipient is on a sanctions list, or if the transaction exceeds a set internal limit.

By offering the speed, efficiency, and programmability of blockchain without the price volatility, stablecoins are quickly becoming essential infrastructure. As leading financial institutions like Visa embrace these digital assets, they are no longer an edge-case technology, but rather the foundation for a faster, smarter, and more liquid future for global business finance.