Lloyds Banking Group completed a seven-day live pilot using USDC to settle $750,000 in payment obligations with Visa. The bank bought the stablecoin (a digital token designed to maintain a stable value) through Archax, a UK-regulated digital asset exchange, and booked the transactions through its Corporate Markets branch in Jersey before sending the funds to Visa in the United States. Visa received the money in under an hour, including over the weekend, compared with a day or more under traditional cross-border settlement processes when transactions begin outside banking hours. The pilot focused on settlement, the process institutions use to exchange funds and reconcile payment activity, rather than how payments are made. Lloyds used its own Canton node, a blockchain network with configurable privacy capabilities, while Visa supported settlement on a separate public blockchain. The arrangement tested interoperability between private and public blockchain environments, as well as the potential for round-the-clock settlement to improve speed, transparency, operational visibility and liquidity management. Peter Left, Head of Digital Assets at Lloyds Banking Group, said the live obligations moved the work beyond theory and enabled real-world testing. Rob Cameron, Group Country Manager for UK and Ireland at Visa, said stablecoins can operate alongside existing banking infrastructure, with Visa seeking to make them practical, interoperable and trusted at scale. The trial was described as the first such settlement test between Visa and a major UK banking group and forms part of Lloyds' broader work on digital assets and tokenised money.