Circle partners with Visa to offer benefits of stablecoins to global businesses

By Pavithra R

Circle has announced partnering with Visa to enable global businesses to take advantage of the combined strength of USD Coin (USDC), a fully-reserved digital dollar stablecoin supported across multiple public blockchains, and Visa’s global payments platform and network.

Under the partnership, Circle will join the Visa FinTech Fast Track program, adding new capabilities & opportunities for it’s global customer base and Visa’s FinTech ecosystem. Currently, USDC is issued only by regulated and licensed FIs that maintain full reserves of assets backing each stablecoin. Circle enables businesses to accept payments and send payouts with traditional payment rails as well as new stablecoin infrastructure.

Circle is also extending the flexibility and convenience of the Circle Business Account with the option to add a Circle Visa corporate card that enables Circle business account holders to spend their USDC at more than 60 mn merchants accepting Visa. Additionally, Circle, as a member of Visa’s FinTech Fast Track program, will offer Circle Account & API customers with a seamless digital dollar stablecoin payout experience to the fast-growing network of Visa partner wallets.

“The collaboration between Circle and Visa represents an important development in the support and integration of mainstream payments platforms with stablecoins and blockchain infrastructure, and will offer significant opportunities to expand their use in commerce, payments and financial applications,” said Jeremy Allaire, Co-founder, CEO and Chairman of Circle.

Both the companies will work together to educate and enable Visa’s global network of FintTech partners in its FinTech Fast Track Program and select marketplace partners looking to leverage the benefits of digital dollar stablecoins for global scale payouts.

“Stablecoins like USDC represent a promising payments innovation and provide an emerging platform for fintechs and digital wallets to enable new payment flows. We are excited to partner with industry leaders like Circle to help connect Visa’s clients to the growing USDC payments ecosystem,” said Cuy Sheffield, Head of Crypto at Visa.

Founded in 2013, Circle is a global FinTech firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of stablecoins and public blockchains for payments and commerce worldwide. The firm has introduced next-generation payments processing APIs and has combined the benefits of stablecoins and blockchain with traditional forms of payments like cards and banks. The companies will be piloting USDC payouts to participating Visa partner wallets in early 2021.