Wealthsimple Visa Stablecoin Pilot Settles Canadian Payments Instantly
Wealthsimple and Visa Canada used the wealthsimple visa stablecoin pilot to settle Canadian card purchases with U.S.-dollar-backed stablecoin instead of conventional bank transfers. Volunteer employees used virtual U.S.-dollar credit cards, and the transactions cleared instantly.
Hanna Zaidi, Wealthsimple’s vice-president of payments strategy and chief compliance officer, said the pilot showed that regulated financial institutions could transact using stablecoins while keeping controls and governance in place. She said the test also showed the system can work with minimal human intervention if it is adopted in the future.
Wealthsimple Visa Stablecoin Pilot
Wealthsimple is the first Canadian financial institution to partner with Visa on a pilot to settle payments using stablecoin. The test used the same compliance and risk-management processes Wealthsimple applies to its payment activities, and it ran outside traditional banking business hours on the weekend.
That setup points to the part of the payment chain the pilot tried to change. Settlement between financial institutions can take several days and does not run after hours, on evenings, weekends or holidays. In this test, the transfer completed near-instantly, with few intermediaries between Visa and Wealthsimple.
Hanna Zaidi on controls
Zaidi said, "We wanted to show that regulated financial institutions could transact using stablecoins while still honouring the controls and governance that uphold a secure financial system. There’s a lot of skepticism and hesitation in the space, and so here is Visa and Wealthsimple engaging in this pilot, and it was successful for us," She also said, "For us as a business, that kind of availability improves how quickly we can manage funding and liquidity across our platform," and, "It’s important for the industry to understand that there is a way to embrace this technology without completely overhauling your existing systems."
The timing places the pilot inside a shifting regulatory backdrop. The U.S. Congress passed a bill dubbed the Genius Act last July to create a regulatory framework for stablecoin, Canada’s Stablecoin Act received royal assent in March, and Ottawa said in the fall federal budget that it would introduce measures for regulation and enforcement. Canada’s real-time rail system has faced several delays, which leaves the pilot as a practical test of an alternative route already working inside a controlled environment.
Canada stablecoin settlement
For cardholders, the concrete change is speed: a small group of volunteer employees made purchases, and the settlement cleared instantly instead of waiting on the normal banking timetable. For Wealthsimple, the test showed how funding and liquidity management could move faster if the model is used more widely.
The next step is not another announcement in the abstract, but whether regulated institutions decide to build on this process using the same controls, settlement tools and operating model that Wealthsimple and Visa Canada tested on the weekend.
