Visa Moves Stablecoin Payments Pilot to Production with Inyo Global

Visa announced on Thursday that it has transitioned its stablecoin payments pilot into a commercial production phase. The company is partnering with Inyo Global, a Massachusetts-based payments infrastructure firm, to bring Visa Direct capabilities to real-world applications. Inyo Global will act as a middleman, enabling businesses to prefund payouts 24/7 with USDC and manage liquidity more efficiently through its existing APIs.

Visa Direct facilitates fiat-to-stablecoin cross-border payments, allowing recipients to receive dollar-pegged assets in real time, particularly in markets where payment infrastructure is lacking. This provides predictable settlement values even outside normal banking hours. Vira Platonova, Global Head of Visa Direct, said the next chapter for stablecoins is adoption, and that the company's efforts are now translating into live implementations, starting with Inyo Global as the first enabler.

Robson Dantas, chief product and technology officer and co-founder at Inyo Global, emphasized that the implementation allows institutional customers to test the advantages of using stablecoins. He noted that integrating Visa Direct's stablecoin-enabled prefunding into the Inyo platform offers money transmitters, fintechs, and payment companies a new way to fund payouts around the clock using the same Inyo APIs they already use.

Visa has been increasingly involved with stablecoins. The company recently reported that stablecoin settlements on its network reached a $20 billion annualized run rate, a 15x increase from the previous year. In September, Visa also completed its first stablecoin settlement with Lloyds Banking Group, receiving $750,000 in USDC during a seven-day pilot that operated when traditional banks were closed.