We ran the first stablecoin settlement experiment in Canada with Visa Canada – and it worked.

If you’ve ever paid off your credit card on a Friday, you probably know it doesn’t go through until the following Monday. This is true for any financial settlement between financial institutions — even online transactions don’t move on evenings, weekends, or holidays. So we had an idea. We wanted to see if we could use stablecoins — a technology operating on a 24/7/365 network — to (almost) instantly settle credit card transactions.

Delayed settlement is, for most people, an annoyance. You might find your credit card statement a little hard to read, but it generally doesn’t interrupt your day-to-day spending. It’s more of a hassle for a business. If you’re a coffee shop owner and you need to restock after a busy Saturday, waiting two or three business days for your business credit card to settle with your suppliers can have a big impact on your cash flow and, ultimately, whether you have enough coffee beans or napkins for your customers.

At Wealthsimple, we are always looking for opportunities to embrace new technology that makes financial services better for Canadians, and we believe the current state of payment settlement needs significant improvement.

So we called up one of our partners Visa — a world leader in stablecoin innovation — and ​ suggested a closed test: use a regulated, US dollar-denominated stablecoin to settle credit card transactions with a small group of volunteer cardholders. Together, we wanted to prove that Canadian financial institutions can transact using stablecoins, while honouring the controls and governance that uphold a secure and regulated financial system.

We’re proud to say the pilot was a success, making Wealthsimple the first Canadian financial institution to settle credit card transactions with Visa using stablecoins. Here’s what it looked like:

How did the pilot test work?

Wealthsimple issued a set of virtual USD credit cards to a small group of employees who volunteered to help us test it out. Those employees used the cards for everyday purchases like groceries and bills. When they made their purchases, the money was settled with US-backed stablecoin on-chain between Visa and the card issuer (in this case, Wealthsimple) instead of through instead of a conventional bank transfer. The result? All the transactions cleared nearly instantly, whether or not they were made during traditional banking hours. Money moved behind the scenes faster and with fewer intermediaries. And the customer experience was unchanged.

You mention governance and security controls. What were they?

This pilot was conducted under the same compliance and risk management standards we apply to all of our payments activity. That included defined approval workflows, treasury oversight of all settlement flows, full reconciliation against Visa obligations, and ongoing monitoring by our compliance and AML teams. The pilot was scoped deliberately — limited participants, limited volume — so that we could validate the process in a controlled environment before considering any broader application.

Why does this matter?

Open banking, real-time payments, and stablecoins all have a role to play in the future of money movement. Each is useful on its own and together, they're the foundation for a fundamentally different kind of financial infrastructure.

We see stablecoins as one layer of a broader shift toward programmable finance. That's a term worth unpacking, because it doesn't mean recurring payments. A recurring payment is a static instruction: move this amount, on this date, to this account. Programmable finance means money that can respond to context. You land in another country and your money automatically picks the right currency without you needing to worry about conversion of switching cards. A small business facing a delayed payment bridges the gap with a backup line of credit, then repays itself the moment its invoice is paid. It means making things less manual.

Will Wealthsimple use stablecoins to settle credit card transactions in the near future?

Not yet. But since conducting this experiment, there have been some exciting developments. For one, our partners at Tetra — a leading Canadian digital asset company — just launched the first regulated CAD-backed stablecoin, which is important to testing in this space further. And we need more financial institutions to be open to using new technology, like Visa. But this is an exciting step forward for integrating stablecoins into Canada’s payments ecosystem, and we look forward to more tests in the future.