Visa Pilots Stablecoin Prefunding for Cross-Border Payouts

Visa is adding stablecoins to its money movement playbook, piloting a way for businesses to prefund cross-border payouts on Visa Direct without tying up cash in traditional accounts.

Announced at SIBOS 2025, the pilot lets banks, remittance firms and other institutions load stablecoins into Visa Direct as a standing funding source for global disbursements. Visa treats those tokens as available balance, aiming to cut prefunding friction and give treasurers faster access to working capital when moving money across markets. Recipients, Visa said, will still be paid in local currency.

The company framed the effort as a treasury upgrade rather than a crypto experiment. Stablecoin prefunding is designed to reduce exposure to local currency swings, add predictability to settlement and turn what can be days of float into minutes. Visa is working with select partners during the pilot and targets limited availability by April 2026, with broader expansion to follow.

“Visa Direct’s new stablecoins integration lays the groundwork for money to move instantly across the world, giving businesses more choice in how they pay,” said Chris Newkirk, president of Commercial & Money Movement Solutions at Visa.

Behind the scenes, the model is straightforward. Instead of prefunding fiat accounts across corridors, participating institutions prefund Visa Direct with stablecoins, which Visa treats as “money in the bank” for outgoing payouts. Visa positions the approach as a way to unlock liquidity, modernize cash management and provide a consistent settlement layer that can reduce volatility in multi-currency operations. The pilot builds on the company’s broader effort to pair its network scale with programmable blockchain rails for business-to-consumer and business-to-business payouts.

The announcement lands amid steady stablecoin coverage by PYMNTS. This month, we reported Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller’s view that the private sector is better positioned to innovate on stablecoins than the Fed, underscoring how policy and market forces are converging on real-world payments use cases. We covered PayPal’s push to deepen liquidity for PYUSD via DeFi platform Spark and examined how community banks and credit unions are weighing stablecoins as a tool to retain deposits and speed payouts. Earlier this summer, PYMNTS detailed Visa’s own moves to expand stablecoin support on its settlement platform and highlighted pilots such as Wirex’s use of EURC for near real-time settlement on Visa.