Visa is working with Nium to explore seven-day stablecoin settlement through Singapore’s BLOOM initiative, as the payments giant tests faster and more programmable cross-border flows, Fintech News Singapore reported.
The BLOOM pilot
Led by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, BLOOM stands for Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online and Multi-currency, and brings together financial institutions and industry participants to test faster cross-border payments. 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, and because payment settlements typically take place on business days, the two companies will explore settlement on weekends and public holidays.
How it works
The pilot will use regulated stablecoins backed by major currencies, including the U.S. dollar and 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. BLOOM brings together financial institutions and other industry participants to test faster and more programmable cross-border payments, and the pilot is part of Visa’s broader experimentation with blockchain-based settlement as the company extends its network beyond card rails into digital-asset infrastructure.
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, called it a step toward seamless interoperability between traditional and stablecoin-based rails, adding that the convergence is inevitable and essential. Visa and Nium did not provide a timeline for the pilot, which marks one of the more prominent efforts by a major card network to integrate regulated stablecoins into its settlement rails. The pilot 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.
The move adds to the region’s banks moving into stablecoin infrastructure.