These clients can now receive payments in the dollar-backed USDC on the Ethereum blockchain, powered by Coinbase’s payments products, PNC announced Monday (Nov. 9).
“Our clients are continually looking at new ways to interact and transact with customers, suppliers and business partners,” Tom Lang, PNC’s head of treasury management product and operations, said in a news release. “This solution gives us an opportunity to support our customers with innovative capabilities, backed by the banking experience, risk management and expertise clients expect from PNC.”
The solution builds on PNC’s relationship with Coinbase and the bank’s ongoing investment in its treasury management capabilities, the release said. It also complements PNC’s faster payments capabilities and is a sign of the bank’s focus on offering clients a “broad range of immediate payment options,” the release added.
“Stablecoins are modernizing how businesses move money by making payments faster, more efficient and more global,” said Alec Lovett, head of infrastructure products at Coinbase. “Our work with PNC shows how leading banks and trusted digital asset infrastructure come together to let corporate clients take advantage of this technology.”
PYMNTS wrote last month that the various possibilities offered by stablecoins are “generating excitement at the highest levels of the payment ecosystem. For example, Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach said recently that cross-border payments are proving to be the strongest use case for the digital tokens.
PYMNTS Intelligence research shows that cross-border B2B transfers are already one of the largest use cases for stablecoins, representing the bulk of global stablecoin payment volume.
“But receiving money is not the same as having spendable working capital,” PYMNTS wrote. “Stablecoins may be creating a faster global payments network without creating a self-sufficient financial system. The more money that network handles, the more consequential its dependence on traditional banking could become.”
Meanwhile, PNC announced last week that it was widening its branch expansion plans to more than 370 new locations by 2031. This figure includes the more 70 branches that have opened since the bank announced its original expansion plans.
This is happening at a moment when “the U.S. bank branch count is moving up meaningfully,” for the first time in years, as “some of the biggest banks are putting billions of dollars behind the physical network,” as PYMNTS wrote in August.
FDIC data shows 69,167 branches at the end of last year, up from 68,632 a year earlier. In addition to PNC, banks such as JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America are in the midst of wide-ranging expansions of their brick-and-mortar footprints.
