Mastercard Brings Stablecoin Holdings into Traditional Banking and Card Payments

Launch of the Global Money Platform marks Mastercard's first major integration with BVNK since its acquisition in August, with Nuvei and Marqeta among the first companies to adopt the platform.

The launch of the global money platform is MasterCard's first major integration with BVNK since its acquisition in August, with Nuvei and Marqeta among the first to adopt the platform.

MasterCard is expanding its role in stablecoin payments with a new platform that allows businesses to integrate digital currencies into traditional banking and card services, a move that could make it easier for companies to offer stablecoin payments without building their own infrastructure.

The service, called Global Money Platform, is MasterCard's first major integration with BVNK since it bought infrastructure firm Stablecoin in August, the payments giant announced on Thursday.

According to MasterCard, businesses can use the platform to hold and convert fiat currencies and stablecoins, offer stablecoin-linked cards, and pay directly from stablecoin balances to recipients' local bank accounts.

The service connects to Mastercard Move, the company's global money transfer network, which can route payments to more than 17 billion destinations, including bank and card accounts. It also connects stablecoin balances to MasterCard's merchant network and allows customers to spend them with payment cards. Nuvei, Marqeta and several other fintech companies are among the first integration partners.

The launch expands MasterCard's role beyond processing payments to providing infrastructure that financial firms can use to offer stablecoin services under their own brands. It also puts MasterCard in closer competition with Visa, which launched a platform in July that allows financial institutions to hold, multiply and transfer stablecoins.

This comes as Standard Chartered research points to growth in stablecoin transaction activity, even as circulating supplies of major tokens such as USDt and USDC have remained relatively flat this year.