According to a presentation made by the president of the business's cryptocurrency division at StarkWare Sessions 2023, payment company Visa is attempting to develop "muscle memory" around settlements with intentions to enable users to convert digital assets to fiat currencies on its platform.
During a fireside talk during the occasion, Cuy Sheffield remarked:
“We’ve been testing how to actually accept settlement payments from issuers in USDC starting on Ethereum and paying out in USDC on Ethereum. So, these are large value settlement payments.”
One of the areas Visa is investing in, according to the CEO, is worldwide settlement using digital assets and fiat currencies. He said specifically:
“That’s been one of the areas where we want to build muscle memory. The same way that we can convert between dollars in euros on a cross-border transaction, we should be able to convert between digital tokenized dollars and traditional dollars.”
Settlements still take place on the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, or SWIFT system, a not-for-profit cooperative society founded by European bankers with the goal of facilitating secure and standardized transaction communication between its members. The payment giant has been investigating how to integrate blockchain technology into its current network to move money more quickly.
The Executive continued saying:
“We set all over Swift, so we can’t move money as frequently as we’d like because there are a number of limitations that exist in those networks. And so, we’ve been experimenting, we publicly announced. We’ve been testing how to actually accept settlement payments [with stablecoins].”
