Visa launches platform for banks and fintechs to run stablecoins

Visa announced on July 16 a new enterprise platform that lets financial institutions, fintechs and crypto firms issue and manage stablecoins within Visa’s own payment and treasury infrastructure, according to a company statement. The service, called the Visa Stablecoin Platform, will begin with support for Open USD, the token recently introduced by the Open Standard consortium.

The platform gives clients a single Visa-managed environment to mint, burn, hold, transfer and redeem stablecoins, the company said, rather than assembling that infrastructure piece by piece. It includes an onchain wallet capability that Visa is calling a Wallet-as-a-Service offering.

“Stablecoins are opening up a new layer of programmable money, but for most institutions the hard part isn’t the concept, it’s the operational reality,” Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product and strategy officer, said in the statement.

Visa said the platform is interoperable with its existing stablecoin products, including settlement services, stablecoin-linked cards and cross-border money movement. Rubail Birwadker, Visa’s global head of growth, told Fortune that the emphasis is on how stablecoins connect with the treasury settlement and money movement systems institutions already run.

The company, which settles roughly 15 trillion dollars in payments a year and already processes several billion dollars in stablecoin settlements, said it aims to make adoption easier across its network of about 15,000 financial institutions and more than 200 million merchants, according to Fortune and Bloomberg.

The platform and the wallet service are initially available to a select group of clients through a beta program, Visa said. The company added that feedback from those early deployments will guide how the product expands toward broader availability.