Circle is extending its reach across Latin America, teaming up with payments technology firm ACI Worldwide to fold USDC settlement into the region's existing banking rails, starting with a pilot in Colombia. USDC is a stablecoin issued by Circle and designed to hold parity with the U.S. dollar.

Announced Tuesday, the collaboration pairs Circle's USDC infrastructure with ACI Connetic, ACI's cloud-based payments orchestration platform — a layer that lets banks connect to multiple payment methods through a single integration — to show financial institutions how stablecoin settlement can run alongside traditional payment systems rather than replace them. The partnership was detailed in an official announcement published by the two companies.

The initial focus is Colombia, where ACI built the central infrastructure behind Bre-B, the country's interoperable instant-payments network that enables real-time transfers between accounts at different banks. Instant-payment rails of this kind have spread quickly across Latin America, with Brazil's Pix standing as the region's most prominent example of account-to-account transfers reaching mass adoption. The idea is to test how a digital dollar like USDC can slot into that real-time, account-to-account system to create what the companies call a multi-rail ecosystem.

The framing reflects a broader shift in how banks are approaching stablecoins. Rather than debating the merits of the technology itself, institutions increasingly want practical answers on how digital dollars fit into the treasury operations, governance structures, and settlement processes they already run.

“The conversation around stablecoins is moving from possibility to practicality,” said Craig Ramsey, ACI's global head of account-to-account payments, describing the effort as a way to integrate regulated stablecoins into workflows that banks already trust.

Kash Razzaghi, Circle's chief commercial officer, said financial institutions across Latin America are increasingly looking at how stablecoins can support the evolution of payments “within the infrastructure they already use,” framing USDC as a bridge between traditional finance and the digital economy.

The move builds on Circle's steady regional expansion. The company has pushed into dozens of emerging markets as stablecoins go mainstream, and it earlier gained a Latin American foothold when Argentina's Mercado Pago added USDC.

Colombia stands out as a logical next target. The country handles high volumes of cross-border remittances, and its population is well-acquainted with dollar-denominated savings as a hedge against inflation. Cross-border payments moving through traditional correspondent-banking chains can take days to settle and involve multiple intermediaries that each add cost and delay — the kind of friction dollar stablecoins are designed to reduce, since transfers on public blockchains can finalize in minutes rather than days.

Circle positioned the pilot as technology-agnostic: while the initial run is on USDC, ACI's platform is built to support other payment networks and digital-asset providers over time. That makes the Colombia run a test with implications beyond a single market: if the multi-rail model holds up, the same orchestration layer could, in principle, carry additional stablecoins and payment networks for the banks already plugged into it.

For Circle, the deal is another step in weaving its stablecoin into the plumbing of mainstream finance, this time in a fast-growing payments market where instant-payment adoption is already accelerating.