Shinhan Financial Group, one of South Korea's four largest financial holding companies, has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Visa to advance digital asset services and build next-generation financial infrastructure. The agreement was formalized on August 26 in Seoul by Shinhan Financial Chairman Jin Ok-dong and Visa President Chris Newkirk, putting into practice discussions that began between the two companies' leadership in April.

Under the terms of the deal, Shinhan Financial will use Visa's stablecoin platform to validate core functionalities including token issuance, transfers, and redemption. The two sides also plan to jointly design business models tailored to South Korea's regulatory framework and domestic market conditions. That framework is still taking shape: during 2025, South Korean legislators introduced competing bills to create a legal basis for won-denominated stablecoins, including proposals that would allow non-bank financial institutions such as brokerages and card companies to issue them under regulatory conditions, while the Bank of Korea has been running its own tokenized-deposit pilot, Project Han River, with commercial banks. Beyond stablecoin infrastructure, the initiative covers exploring tokenized settlement for credit card billing, developing artificial intelligence-powered payment architectures, and expanding both business-to-business and business-to-consumer payment offerings.

The group intends to combine the capabilities of its banking, card, and Jeju Bank subsidiaries with Visa's global network and technological resources to address evolving demands in digital finance. Visa arrives with hands-on stablecoin experience: it has settled transactions in the USDC stablecoin on Ethereum and Solana with acquirers including Worldpay and Nuvei since 2023, and its Visa Tokenized Asset Platform has been used by banks such as Spain's BBVA to issue fiat-backed tokens in pilots. The arrangement extends the existing partnership into the broader digital finance sector, with the stated objective of delivering differentiated financial experiences to customers through newly designed service models.

Proof-of-Concept Testing and AI Payment Pilots

Shinhan Card, the group's card subsidiary led by Chief Executive Officer Park Chang-hoon, has already completed proof-of-concept trials for six stablecoin and blockchain use cases. The tests evaluated whether conventional fiat-based card payment systems can interoperate with digital asset payment and settlement environments and ultimately be developed into commercial services. Participants included Visa, Mastercard, Fireblocks, and various domestic and international blockchain firms.

The pilot scenarios covered peer-to-peer blockchain payments, integration with external digital wallets, a hybrid debit-credit model backed by stablecoin collateral, cross-border remittance and settlement, payment-exchange-settlement networks, and IC chip-based hardware wallet technology.

In the debit-credit hybrid structure, stablecoins can be withdrawn immediately or held as collateral to establish a spending limit, merging characteristics of digital assets with traditional credit mechanisms. The cross-border remittance pilot specifically sought to determine whether international payment flows could be processed with greater speed and at lower cost. In collaboration with Solana, the company also examined a smart contract-based model designed to execute transactions automatically once predefined conditions are met. Additional technical evaluations included non-custodial wallet operability and oracle systems linking real-world transaction data to blockchain networks.

Separately, Shinhan Card conducted live-environment demonstrations of AI agent payments in collaboration with Mastercard, becoming the first South Korean card issuer to do so. In a pilot linked to a global mobility platform, an artificial intelligence system autonomously identified transportation options, completed a booking, and processed payment following a single user authorization. Mastercard has been building in the same two domains, agreeing in 2025 to acquire a stake in the stablecoin settlement network Fnality and introducing tools aimed at AI-agent commerce.

The two companies jointly designed supporting infrastructure spanning authentication, authorization management, payment procedures, AI capability upgrades, and merchant integration, with particular attention to maintaining user control and security within automated workflows.

Shinhan Card also partnered with the Solana Foundation in April to test Web3 payment scenarios on the Solana testnet, and is participating in the Solana Foundation and Google Cloud's AI Agentic Hackathon as an institutional partner to foster solutions combining stablecoin infrastructure with autonomous payment agents. The immediate open questions for the group's digital asset push are whether the six pilot use cases and the AI payment demonstrations progress into commercial services, and how South Korea's pending stablecoin legislation defines what banks and card companies will be permitted to issue and operate.

Source: Metaverse Post