Circle and payments firm ACI Worldwide are taking USDC deeper into Latin America with a pilot that plugs the dollar-pegged stablecoin into Colombia’s banking rails.
The collaboration, announced Tuesday, pairs Circle’s USDC infrastructure with ACI Connetic — ACI’s cloud-based payments orchestration platform — to demonstrate how regulated stablecoin settlement can operate side-by-side with existing payment systems instead of replacing them. The initial testbed is Colombia, where ACI helped build Bre-B, the country’s interoperable instant-payments network.
The pilot will experiment with routing USDC settlement into Colombia’s real-time, account-to-account flow, creating what the partners call a “multi-rail” ecosystem. In practice, that means banks and payment providers could settle transactions using USDC while continuing to rely on the treasury, governance and settlement processes they already run.
“The conversation around stablecoins is moving from possibility to practicality,” said Craig Ramsey, ACI’s global head of account-to-account payments, framing the project as a way to integrate regulated stablecoins into workflows banks already trust. Kash Razzaghi, Circle’s chief commercial officer, added that financial institutions across Latin America are increasingly exploring how stablecoins can evolve payments “within the infrastructure they already use,” positioning USDC as a bridge between traditional finance and the digital economy.
The move builds on Circle’s steady Latin American push: the company has expanded into dozens of emerging markets and recently gained a foothold when Argentina’s Mercado Pago added USDC. Colombia is a logical next target given its large cross-border remittance flows, widespread use of dollar-denominated savings as an inflation hedge, and accelerating adoption of instant payments.
Circle and ACI say the pilot is technology-agnostic in design: while it centers on USDC for this test, ACI’s platform can accommodate other payment networks and digital-asset providers over time. For Circle, the partnership is another step toward embedding its stablecoin into the plumbing of mainstream finance — particularly in a fast-growing payments market ripe for multi-rail settlement innovation.
The collaboration, announced Tuesday, pairs Circle’s USDC infrastructure with ACI Connetic — ACI’s cloud-based payments orchestration platform — to demonstrate how regulated stablecoin settlement can operate side-by-side with existing payment systems instead of replacing them. The initial testbed is Colombia, where ACI helped build Bre-B, the country’s interoperable instant-payments network.
The pilot will experiment with routing USDC settlement into Colombia’s real-time, account-to-account flow, creating what the partners call a “multi-rail” ecosystem. In practice, that means banks and payment providers could settle transactions using USDC while continuing to rely on the treasury, governance and settlement processes they already run.
“The conversation around stablecoins is moving from possibility to practicality,” said Craig Ramsey, ACI’s global head of account-to-account payments, framing the project as a way to integrate regulated stablecoins into workflows banks already trust. Kash Razzaghi, Circle’s chief commercial officer, added that financial institutions across Latin America are increasingly exploring how stablecoins can evolve payments “within the infrastructure they already use,” positioning USDC as a bridge between traditional finance and the digital economy.
The move builds on Circle’s steady Latin American push: the company has expanded into dozens of emerging markets and recently gained a foothold when Argentina’s Mercado Pago added USDC. Colombia is a logical next target given its large cross-border remittance flows, widespread use of dollar-denominated savings as an inflation hedge, and accelerating adoption of instant payments.
Circle and ACI say the pilot is technology-agnostic in design: while it centers on USDC for this test, ACI’s platform can accommodate other payment networks and digital-asset providers over time. For Circle, the partnership is another step toward embedding its stablecoin into the plumbing of mainstream finance — particularly in a fast-growing payments market ripe for multi-rail settlement innovation.