Visa has said it is joining BLOOM, the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s initiative to expand how financial institutions settle payments, bringing a global card network into a regulator-led effort to connect traditional payment systems with stablecoin-based rails. Visa set out its involvement in a statement dated 25 August 2026.
What Visa and Nium are testing
Visa says the first company it has lined up to trial stablecoin settlement under BLOOM is Nium, a cross-border payments firm. Their pilot turns on a specific question: whether settlement, which for most institutions still clears only on business days, can run every day of the week, including weekends and public holidays. Visa’s case is that an always-on cycle would cut settlement delays, reduce friction in the process, and let participating institutions access funds sooner. The tokens in scope are regulated stablecoins pegged to major currencies, including US dollar- and euro-backed ones.
“The future of payments will be shaped by how different forms of money and payment networks work together for different use cases. Through BLOOM and our pilot with Nium in Singapore, we are exploring how stablecoins can complement existing payment infrastructure, enabling greater flexibility in settlement while preserving the security, resilience and compliance standards that underpin global commerce. As digital payments continue to evolve, interoperability will be critical to delivering meaningful value across the financial ecosystem,” said Adeline Kim, Group Country Manager for Regional Southeast Asia and Senior Vice President, Global Clients and Acquirers, Asia Pacific at Visa.
Nium framed the pilot as a step forward in an existing relationship with Visa.
“This pilot with Visa under BLOOM is a meaningful step in our partnership to shape the next phase of payments in the region,” said Amaresh Mohan, Chief Risk and Compliance Officer at Nium.
What BLOOM is
MAS launched BLOOM on 16 October 2025. The name stands for Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online and Multi-currency. As MAS describes it, the initiative is a collaboration with the industry aimed at letting institutions settle using two categories of digital money the regulator treats as sound: tokenised bank liabilities and regulated stablecoins. Common technical standards are meant to sit underneath that work, keeping pace with the risks of a rapidly changing settlement market. It grew out of Project Orchid, a MAS programme that has run since 2021 to test how a digital Singapore dollar might work and what plumbing it would need.
The scope MAS has set is wide. On currencies, it reaches beyond the G10 to take in Asian ones as well, and it applies whether a payment stays onshore or crosses a border. On use cases, it targets the wholesale side, from corporate treasury and trade finance to the emerging area of agentic payments. MAS also points to programmable controls that automate compliance checks as a way to lower the cost of cross-border wholesale settlement.
On its BLOOM page, MAS lists members including Anchorage Digital, Ant International, Circle, Coinbase, DBS, J.P. Morgan, Kasikorn Bank, OCBC, Partior, Ripple, Schroders, Standard Chartered, StraitsX, Stripe, Temasek, UOB and Xweave. Visa’s participation was set out in the company’s own announcement, not in the MAS member list at the time of writing.
Why it matters
Bringing a global card network into a supervisor-led settlement scheme signals how stablecoins are moving from the edges of payments toward regulated market infrastructure. For compliance and treasury teams, the key details are that the settlement assets in scope are regulated stablecoins and tokenised bank money rather than unbacked tokens, and that MAS is building programmable compliance checks into the framework. A seven-day settlement cycle would also change the liquidity and reconciliation assumptions that are currently built around business-day processing.
