Payments Modernization & Rails

Citi announced an expanded collaboration with Coinbase to power Coinbase Virtual Accounts and enable institutional stablecoin payment acceptance via Spring by Citi, initially in the United States. The collaboration links Coinbase's digital asset infrastructure with Citi's regulated banking network and creates an industry-first automatic fiat-to-stablecoin conversion feature. Coinbase Global also reported that Chief Accounting Officer Jennifer Jones plans to retire after a successor is appointed. The company's narrative projects $8.5 billion revenue and $2.1 billion earnings by 2028, requiring 8.3% yearly revenue growth and a $0.8 billion earnings decrease from $2.9 billion today, with a $383.46 fair value implying 110% upside to its current price. Some of the most optimistic analysts already expected Coinbase to reach about US$9.3 billion of revenue and US$2.2 billion of earnings.

SoFi Technologies and Mastercard announced that stablecoin settlement went live across SoFi Bank, N.A.'s debit and credit card program, migrating its entire US$25.00 billion card portfolio to SoFiUSD. SoFiUSD is the first stablecoin issued by a nationally chartered bank on Mastercard's global network, positioning bank-issued stablecoins as an operational bridge between traditional payment rails and blockchain infrastructure. The move connects to SoFi's April 2026 launch of Big Business Banking, which lets enterprises manage fiat and crypto, mint and burn SoFiUSD, and access real time payments in a single bank interface. SoFi's narrative projects $7.7 billion revenue and $1.6 billion earnings by 2029, requiring 21.6% yearly revenue growth and an earnings increase of about $1.0 billion from $636.3 million today, while the most pessimistic analysts saw SoFi reaching only about US$6.0 billion revenue and US$1.0 billion earnings by 2029.

Metaplanet acquired former Siiibo Securities, which handles privately placed corporate bonds, for 210 million yen and changed its name to Metaplanet Securities in July; the subsidiary securities firm recounted the two months leading up to the acquisition. On September 29, the Financial Services Agency announced it would support a pilot program using stablecoins for trade settlement, with six companies participating: TradeWaltz, NTT Data, Mizuho Bank, MUFG Bank, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, and Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking. On September 28, Coinbase announced on X that it will soon offer a service allowing users to open Pokémon card packs on smartphones. On October 2, Metaplanet corrected a total of four documents including previously filed annual securities reports, revising a statement that CEO Simon Gerovich indirectly holds a majority of voting rights in shareholder MMXX Ventures Limited to clarify that he does not hold a majority. On September 30, KDDI, au Coincheck Digital Assets, and HashPort announced they will begin offering the crypto asset wallet αU wallet as a mini app within the au PAY app.

The State Bank of Vietnam, or SBV, has adjusted its cross-border payment strategy, aiming to connect the VietQRGlobal infrastructure to six major markets in Asia: Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, China, South Korea and Singapore. The shift moves from building infrastructure alone to scaling real-world usage to drive the tourism, retail and international trade sectors, according to a workshop report cited by the overseas trade promotion office in Ho Chi Minh City and vietnamnews.vn. The domestic base is strong: at the end of 2025, nearly 89 percent of Vietnamese people aged 15 and over held accounts with licensed financial institutions, and the total value of cashless payments surged to more than 28 times gross domestic product. In the first eight months of 2026, the number of cashless payment transactions grew a further 34.56 percent and value rose 13.26 percent compared with the same period a year earlier. QR Code transactions totalled 311 million, up 6.66 percent, with a combined value of more than 274.2 trillion Vietnamese dong, or about 10.6 billion US dollars, up 25.85 percent. On cross-border transactions, in the first eight months of 2026, travellers from Thailand, Laos and Cambodia paying in Vietnam rose eightfold in transaction count and sixfold in value, while Vietnamese users in those three countries increased transaction counts fivefold and value fourfold. In the Chinese market, Vietnam linked VietQRGlobal through NAPAS with UnionPay International in December 2025, Alipay in April 2026 and Weixin Pay in August 2026, so that just four months after the expansion, transactions by Chinese tourists scanning to pay in Vietnam jumped threefold in number and fourfold in value. On security, the SIMO system, launched on 26 August 2026, issued more than 5.1 million risk warnings, prompting customers to suspend or cancel nearly 1.7 million suspicious transactions and preventing more than 5.7 trillion Vietnamese dong in losses. Vietnam's push to build a payment network covering more than 154,000 acceptance points and to bring tourists from Asia, who make up 74.2 to 78.6 percent of all foreign visitors to Vietnam, more easily into the digital spending system could let tourism and retail spending in Vietnam outpace the rest, unless Thai operators move quickly to adapt.

Fiserv has launched the Roughrider stablecoin, a bank-to-bank settlement token built on Solana. Versa Bank issues the bank-only token, which serves a North Dakota network of more than 90 banks and credit unions. The coin is designed for interbank settlement among those institutions rather than for consumer retail use, replacing legacy systems such as Swift and ACH with near-instant, near-zero-fee transfers. The North Dakota effort is separate from a national network of regional and community banks that is launching its own bank stablecoin network. Because the token runs on Solana, its growth could drive demand for the network's gas fees.

The US economy added just 29,000 jobs in September, well below expectations of 89,000, while the unemployment rate rose to 4.2% against an expected 4.1%, a miss that host Scott Melker said weakens the case for further Fed rate hikes and points toward cuts. Prior months were revised sharply lower, with July cut by 31,000 to 10,000 and August by 29,000 to 133,000, leaving combined employment 60,000 lower than previously reported, and wage growth slowed to 0.1% monthly and 3% annually. Separately, the SEC proposed dedicated custody rules that would let registered investment advisors, investment funds and business development companies hold crypto assets directly under federal securities law, with state-chartered trust companies able to serve as permitted crypto custodians and client assets segregated from the trust company's own assets. In other news, Fiserv launched the Roughrider stablecoin, a bank-to-bank settlement token on Solana serving a North Dakota network of more than 90 banks and credit unions, and the Ethereum Foundation launched zero-knowledge APIs, built with the Open Anonymity Project, that let users pay for AI models without revealing identity. Near Intents was hit by a 3.8 million dollar exploit, with no customer funds lost, and another Trump meme coin dinner was advertised for top token investors.

Ripple added $765 million to the stablecoin market cap in the recently concluded Q3 2026, trailing only Circle among issuers. The RWA Foundation X account shared information on the growth of the stablecoin market cap in the recently concluded Q3 2026. Ripple's gain placed it second, behind Circle, in the quarter's stablecoin market cap expansion.

Citigroup has launched multi-market instant payments on the Swift network, letting clients reach several cross-border instant payment schemes through a single Citi account setup on Swift. The service is designed to work without separate local bank relationships, bilateral deals, or custom in-house payment infrastructure, and it turns a single Citi account into a hub reaching instant schemes in AUD, GBP and INR, plus expanded USD clearing. Citi plans to extend the Swift-based instant payment coverage to more countries and currencies over time as part of its digital payments push. The bank, a US$217.2b financial group, said the launch supports its Services franchise, adding to the double-digit Services revenue growth already reported in 2Q26. Investors will watch how much instant payment volume and related Services revenue Citigroup attributes to Swift and WorldLink in upcoming quarterly reports, along with client adoption across the 12,500 Swift institutions.

PayPay announced on September 30 that it has begun a partnership with Binance Pay, the payment feature of cryptocurrency trading app Binance, through the cross-border payment network HIVEX. Overseas Binance Pay users will now be able to pay for dining, shopping, lodging and other purchases at PayPay merchants across Japan, and merchants will receive their sales proceeds in Japanese yen rather than in crypto assets. Binance Japan users residing in Japan are not covered. HIVEX is a cross-border payment network developed by Silicon Valley-based TBCASoft, which began commercial rollout in 2023, and PayPay has been connecting overseas payment services from Taiwan, China, Hong Kong and elsewhere to its merchant network since that year. With the addition of Binance Pay, which has roughly 48 million users, a payment route has now been established running from Binance Pay through HIVEX and PayPay to merchants.

Mastercard announced the acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure provider BVNK, targeting digital asset settlement capabilities, and introduced new AI-powered trust and intelligence services designed to monitor and secure agentic commerce transactions. Management positioned the BVNK deal and the agentic commerce safeguards as a response to evolving digital asset rules and AI-driven payment risks. The BVNK acquisition and the new agentic commerce trust tools are only one part of Mastercard's broader payments technology ambitions. The BVNK purchase turns stablecoin plumbing into a concrete extension of Mastercard's value added stack, tying into Agent Pay and SoFiUSD settlement and giving the firm more control over how blockchain based flows interact with its fraud, identity and behavioral tools. The push also increases Mastercard's reliance on complex technology and regulatory regimes where rivals such as Visa and Stripe are active.

The OUSD stablecoin has officially gone live with Visa, Mastercard and Stripe behind it, according to Scott Melker on "The Daily Wolf with Scott Melker." OUSD, or Open USD, is a consortium of fintechs and payment companies launching their own stablecoin to compete in a massive market where high interest rates generate essentially free money, and it is being run by Stripe, which acquired Bridge in a unicorn deal and whose Bridge CEO is also running the blockchain. The stablecoin is launching on multiple blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, Base and Tempo, with the bulk of liquidity expected on Stripe's own Tempo blockchain, while reserves will be held at BlackRock, BNY and Lead Bank. Five founding members — Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa — will split the equity and have invested a billion dollars for initial liquidity, and depending on usage they will accrue more or less equity or earnings from the stablecoin, meaning earnings accrue to the companies promoting and using it rather than to a private company behind it. The launch follows a huge debate when it was announced, as 140 logos appeared including BlackRock and others, and some companies said they had never heard of it and had not gotten the memo.

SBI Digital Trust, a subsidiary of SBI Holdings, announced on October 1 that it will jointly conduct verification with two Korean companies, payment provider NICE Information & Telecommunication and blockchain infrastructure firm DSRV Labs, on cross-border remittance and payments between Japan and Korea using stablecoins. The three companies signed a basic agreement on September 30 aimed at future commercialization, and will examine fund flows from users to merchants, methods for connecting each company's systems, expected transaction volumes, and costs, with the goal of completing the work by the end of December 2026. In the verification, a Japanese user will scan a QR code at a NICE Information & Telecommunication merchant, and stablecoins will be used to settle with the Korean-side merchant, while the companies also check instruction methods for remittance and payment and operational issues. NICE Information & Telecommunication supports a network of about 1.2 million merchants in Korea, and the companies will consider payment and settlement operations at physical stores and methods for connecting with existing systems to confirm whether the business can work in an actual merchant environment, while DSRV will verify the blockchain technology and system architecture needed to transfer stablecoins. SBI Digital Trust will consider a Japan-Korea payment scheme in light of Japanese regulations and payment systems, working with companies across the SBI Group. In Korea, work is underway to develop rules for stablecoins, but the details are still under discussion, and the three companies will focus on the technical and operational aspects that can be verified at this point, deciding whether to commercialize based on regulatory developments. The SBI Group also signed a basic agreement with a Korean company in August to build a blockchain-based Japan-Korea payment network for financial institutions, and while the previous effort targeted a payment network intermediated by financial institutions, this time the focus is on payments by Japanese travelers at physical stores in Korea.

Ripple's XRP notched a milestone of 10 million agentic payments amid an ongoing AI boom, even as the broader cryptocurrency market opened the fourth quarter with a local retreat by the bulls. An attempt to establish a new trend above $85,500 on the back of softer morning PCE inflation data of 3.4%, which came in below expectations, resulted in a false breakout. Bitcoin quickly lost momentum, returning to its September closing level of $83,600, and is now trading around $83,975.76, with dominance of 58.74%. Ethereum has settled near $2,706.26, with a market share of 11.50%.

European payment companies including Spain's Bizum, Italy's Bancomat and the Brussels-based European Payment Initiative, which operates Wero, announced on the 30th that they will set up a joint venture to interconnect national payment systems and cooperate on cross-border payments. The joint venture will be called European Network for Payments, or ENP, and will be based in Madrid, Spain. SIBS-MB Way and Vipps MobilePay are also joining the cooperation, and these companies together have about 130 million users across 13 European countries, more than 70 percent of the population of the European Union and Norway. By uniting, the European players aim to challenge US payment giants Visa and Mastercard, which hold a large share of payments in Europe. The cooperation will allow existing payment systems to interconnect through a common technical and operational infrastructure based on European standards and through instant account-to-account payments. They also said the digital euro, a central bank digital currency the European Central Bank plans to introduce by 2029, could complement the effort in the future.

German stablecoin issuer AllUnity began issuing its US dollar-pegged stablecoin USDAU on September 30. It is the fourth fiat-backed token from the company, following the euro-pegged EURAU, the Swiss franc-pegged CHFAU, and the Swedish krona-pegged SEKAU. USDAU complies with the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, known as MiCA, is backed one-to-one by segregated reserves, and is deployed across six blockchains. According to CoinGecko data, dollar-pegged tokens account for more than 99% of the roughly 291 billion dollar stablecoin market, and the European Central Bank warned in June this year that the spread of dollar-denominated tokens could erode the euro's role in tokenized financial markets. In response, AllUnity CEO Alexander Heptner countered that Europe's concern is not the dollar as a currency itself, but the inflow of dollar liquidity through offshore issuers that escape supervision and offer no guaranteed redemption rights or reserve transparency. He said USDAU places dollar liquidity under Europe's strict regulation and will support trade and international payments for companies in the region. A Europe-regulated dollar-pegged stablecoin could become a strong alternative to Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC, but the market capitalization of the company's EURAU remains at only about 400,000 dollars.

Coinbase Global and Citi announced new fiat and stablecoin interoperability features linking Citi's banking rails with Coinbase infrastructure. Citi's Virtual Account Wallet for Coinbase will automatically convert client fiat balances into stablecoins and convert incoming stablecoins back into fiat. Merchants using Citi's Spring platform will be able to accept stablecoin payments while keeping settlement within Citi's regulated banking system. The Citi Virtual Account Wallet and Spring stablecoin rollout gives only a first glimpse of how far this Coinbase bank bridge could reach. The partnership plugs Coinbase's stablecoin and payments stack directly into a large commercial bank's cash management and merchant platforms, supporting Coinbase Global's effort to lean more on subscription style and service revenue rather than depending only on trading activity and market volumes.

Mastercard completed its acquisition of BVNK for up to $1.8 billion on August 3, 2026, more than double the London-based fiat-to-stablecoin payments firm's $750 million valuation from its December 2024 Series B. The deal follows Stripe's $1.1 billion purchase of Bridge in late 2024, and in June 2026 a consortium of more than 140 companies including Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase and BlackRock unveiled Open USD, a stablecoin whose news sent Circle's stock down 17% that day. Visa, which had used BVNK as a stablecoin settlement partner before losing it to Mastercard, issued an RFP on August 18 for a replacement licensed in the US, Canada, UK and Singapore, and Visa Ventures invested $10 million in London startup Velocity as a $10 million add-on to its Series A, bringing the total to $48 million, while Visa's stablecoin settlement run rate roughly doubled to about $7 billion annualized by its fiscal second quarter. On September 30, 2026, the UK's Financial Conduct Authority opened its authorisation gateway for cryptoasset firms including stablecoin issuers, with applications running through February 28, 2027 and full enforcement set for October 25, 2027, while in the US seven agencies missed their one-year rulemaking deadline for the GENIUS Act on July 18, 2026, leaving only NPRMs published ahead of a January 18, 2027 effective date. HSBC's HKD stablecoin RedCoin, distributed through its 3.3 million-user PayMe app, along with Citi's partnership with Coinbase and Circle's work with Volante on USDC settlement, point to infrastructure consolidation rather than open experimentation.

HSBC officially named its stablecoin HSBC RedCoin on September 30, 2026, following its selection as one of only two licensees under Hong Kong's Stablecoins Ordinance. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority granted licenses on April 10, 2026 to just two of 36 applicants: HSBC and Anchorpoint Financial, a joint venture between Standard Chartered, HKT, and Animoca Brands, as reported by Reuters. The ordinance took effect on August 1, 2025. HSBC RedCoin is a retail-first, HKD-pegged, non-interest-bearing stablecoin integrated into the PayMe mobile app, which has 3.3 million registered users, roughly 40% of Hong Kong's population. Maggie Ng, CEO of HSBC Hong Kong and Head of Retail Banking and Wealth, said the token is a natural next step aimed at supporting Hong Kong's financial innovation. The bank distinguishes RedCoin from tokenized deposits such as JPMorgan's JPM Coin and its own Tokenised Deposit Service for institutional clients, which has been active since 2024.

Visa has expanded its relationship with AptPay through a direct integration with Visa Direct for real-time payouts. The tie-up includes the rollout of Visa Direct Alias, which lets recipients receive funds using identifiers other than traditional bank details. AptPay plans to use the Visa Direct connection to support instant disbursements in the U.S. iGaming and digital-first payout market. Visa operates a global payment network connecting card issuers, merchants and consumers, and carries a market value of about $675.0 billion. The next practical checkpoint is how management breaks out Visa Direct and related payout volumes in upcoming results, particularly transaction growth tied to use cases such as iGaming and digital-first disbursements that rely on Alias and similar capabilities.

U.S. payments giant Stripe held its annual conference, Stripe Tour Tokyo 2026, in Tokyo on September 30, with co-founder John Collison taking the stage. Collison said stablecoin usage has reached an "inflection point" this year, and predicted that adoption in Japan will advance first in cross-border transactions such as international remittances. The company processes more than 1.9 trillion dollars in payments annually, equivalent to roughly 1.6% of global GDP. In its annual report published in February 2026, it disclosed that total payment volume in 2025 rose about 34% year on year to roughly 1.9 trillion dollars, that global stablecoin payment volume doubled to about 400 billion dollars, and that roughly 60% of that is estimated to be business-to-business usage. Volume on Bridge, the stablecoin payments platform it acquired, increased more than fourfold. The company is working to enable AI agent transactions without human involvement, using its payments protocol Machine Payments Protocol and its digital wallet Link, which has more than 300 million users.