Qui Sheffield, head of Visa's crypto division, said at the StarkWare Sessions 2023 conference that the company has begun a trial implementation of stablecoin payments on the SWIFT network. He said that customers will be able to convert digital assets into fiat money through Visa's platform. This is part of their mission to make payments with "muscle memory".
Swift (a global interbank financial telecommunications community) provides secure international money transfers.
Sheffield noted that exchanging digital tokenized dollars for traditional dollars should be as easy as exchanging between euros and dollars in cross-border transactions.
By using USDC Stablecoin on the Ethereum blockchain, payments can now be processed much faster. Although SWIFT has some limitations, as Sheffield mentioned, it is still not possible to transfer funds as often as one would like.
For the past few years, Visa has been facilitating digital money transactions outside of SWIFT. In March 2021, cryptocurrency platform Crypto.com was the first to use Ethereum blockchain for a USDC Stablecoin transaction.
Visa recently announced a blockchain-based auto-payment system. This will allow pre-arranged payments to be enacted using smart contracts in customer-owned, non-storage wallets.
