SWIFT is also moving toward blockchain innovation by collaborating with Ethereum and Consensys to develop an interbank settlement network.
The multinational financial services company Visa will begin a pilot test for its first payment system using stablecoins called Visa Direct.
One of the largest card issuers announced its first foray into decentralized payments using cryptocurrencies issued by Circle, USDC, and EURC.
Visa took advantage of the event organized by SWIFT, SIBOS 2025, held in Frankfurt, Germany, to announce its pilot test, which will officially begin in April 2026.
The Visa payment system would make cross-border transactions instantaneous.
The first beneficiaries of Visa Direct will be banks and financial institutions such as cross-border shipping companies. With this alternative, companies will not need to freeze money in accounts in advance, but will be able to ‘pre-finance’ the platform directly and payments will be immediate.
The spokesperson at SIBOS was Chris Newkirk, president of commercial and money movement solutions at Visa, who referred to traditional systems as “obsolete” and presented the pilot as a precedent for integrating stablecoins into traditional payment options.
“Visa Direct is a platform and set of solutions that enable individuals and businesses to collect, hold, convert, and send money, both locally and across borders,” Newkirk said in an interview with Forbes after announcing the program.
Mark Nelsen, Visa’s product manager for commercial and money movement solutions, told Reuters that the GENIUS Act will accelerate the adoption of more profitable and secure cryptocurrencies such as USDC in its payment systems, making everything more “legitimate.”
SWIFT will implement its own blockchain in collaboration with Ethereum
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), which covers more than 11,000 financial institutions in some 200 countries, has begun a collaboration with Ethereum developer Consensys to create a settlement tool on the blockchain.
With this initiative, SWIFT will be able to reduce errors and minimize the risk of fraud in interbank communications and bring them into a digital environment.
This would not be the first time that the interbank network has explored blockchain solutions. In 2024, it collaborated with Chainlink on the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Guardian Project, in its approach to fund tokenization.
Traditional banking’s exploration of modern systems would be a crucial step forward for the crypto market, potentially making more projects, such as AI cryptocurrencies, attractive.
Source: Yahoo!Finanzas
