Visa and Nium Pilot Seven-Day Stablecoin Settlement Under MAS-Led BLOOM Initiative

Visa is teaming up with payments firm Nium to explore seven-day stablecoin settlement through Singapore's BLOOM initiative, as the card network tests faster and more programmable cross-border flows, Fintech News Singapore reported.

Inside the BLOOM pilot

BLOOM — short for Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online and Multi-currency — is led by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), Singapore's central bank and financial regulator, and brings together financial institutions and industry participants to test faster cross-border payments. The initiative extends MAS's long-running work on distributed-ledger payments, which included Project Ubin, a multi-phase experiment from 2016 to 2017 that tested blockchain technology for interbank and cross-border settlement. Maybank Singapore recently joined the initiative to help develop common standards and infrastructure for tokenised cross-border payments.

Nium is Visa's first pilot partner under the program. Because payment settlements typically take place on business days, the two companies will explore settling transactions on weekends and public holidays.

How the settlement works

The pilot will use regulated stablecoins backed by major currencies, including the U.S. dollar and the euro, alongside Visa's payment network and compliance systems. The companies aim to reduce delays and give participating financial institutions faster access to funds outside standard settlement windows.

The emphasis on regulated stablecoins aligns with Singapore's own rules: MAS finalised a stablecoin regulatory framework in August 2023 covering single-currency stablecoins pegged to the Singapore dollar or G10 currencies, with reserve-backing, redemption and disclosure requirements for issuers. Unlike conventional settlement, which runs in business-day batches, blockchains operate around the clock — the property that makes weekend and public-holiday settlement technically possible.

The pilot forms part of Visa's broader experimentation with blockchain-based settlement as the company extends its network beyond card rails into digital-asset infrastructure. Visa previously trialled settling card payments in Circle's USDC stablecoin with Crypto.com on Ethereum, and later expanded those trials to the Solana blockchain with payments providers Worldpay and Nuvei.

What the partners say

Adeline Kim, Visa's Group Country Manager for Regional Southeast Asia, said the pilot explores how stablecoins can complement existing payment infrastructure, enabling greater flexibility in settlement while preserving the security, resilience and compliance standards that underpin global commerce.

Amaresh Mohan, Chief Risk and Compliance Officer at Nium, described the effort as a step toward seamless interoperability between traditional and stablecoin-based rails, adding that the convergence is inevitable and essential.

No timeline yet

Visa and Nium did not provide a timeline for the pilot. The project marks one of the more prominent efforts by a major card network to integrate regulated stablecoins into its settlement rails, and it is among the first to pair a global card network with a licensed payments provider to test stablecoin settlement beyond standard business days — a use case regulators in Singapore have been actively encouraging.

Open questions include whether the pilot extends to additional partners, currencies and jurisdictions, and whether other card networks undertake similar pilots under the initiative.

The move also adds to the list of the region's banks moving into stablecoin infrastructure.

Source: CryptoNewsNet