Visa and Nium pilot stablecoin settlement under MAS BLOOM initiative

Visa and Nium are testing stablecoin settlement in Singapore under the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s BLOOM initiative, with US dollar- and euro-denominated flows set to run seven days a week, including weekends and public holidays. For PSPs and cross-border payment operators, the point is simple: if this works, settlement windows stop being chained to banking hours.

1. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) launched BLOOM in October 2025 to expand cross-border settlement capabilities. BLOOM stands for Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multi-currency, and it builds on MAS’ Project Orchid, which focused on use cases and infrastructure for the digital Singapore dollar.
2. Visa and Nium are using the initiative to trial stablecoin settlement in US dollar and euro-denominated flows. The pilot is meant to test whether stablecoin infrastructure can support payments seven days a week across weekends and public holidays, which is the part that matters when you are trying to move money outside the usual settlement timetable.
3. Visa said the pilot should “reduce delays, improve efficiency, and provide participating financial institutions with faster access to funds.” The firms have not disclosed a timeline for completion, so there is no endpoint to model yet, just the mechanics being tested.
4. MAS is not treating BLOOM as a toy project: Coinbase, Ripple, Stripe, JP Morgan, DBS Bank, OCBC, and Maybank are already taking part. That gives the initiative a fairly visible mix of crypto-native, card, banking, and payments players, which is usually where these experiments become useful rather than just decorative.
5. For Nium, the pilot fits a broader digital asset push. In July, the company acquired Cypher, a crypto-native non-custodial wallet and card issuing company, to expand its on-chain money movement infrastructure.

For high-risk PSPs, the Singapore angle matters because MAS is framing stablecoins and tokenisation as part of a live settlement agenda, not a side project. If similar rails keep moving from pilot to production, the practical question becomes less “is stablecoin settlement real?” and more “which corridors, currencies, and counterparties can actually use it without breaking operations?”