PNC pilots USDC payments for corporate clients with Coinbase

What happened

PNC Bank has begun a limited pilot that allows eligible clients of its Corporate and Institutional Banking unit to receive payments in USDC, the dollar-backed stablecoin, with Coinbase supplying the technology, the two companies announced on Monday. The news was reported by Unchained and Cointelegraph.

Under the arrangement, USDC sent to a participating client is converted one-to-one into dollars automatically and deposited into a designated PNC account, according to Coinbase's announcement. The stablecoin moves on the Ethereum blockchain, PNC said, and Coinbase's Payment APIs handle the stablecoin side of the transaction.

PNC's contribution covers the bank account, its treasury management services and its existing relationships with corporate clients. The bank said the service is meant to give businesses faster access to funds and to make cross-border payments more efficient. Its existing faster payment options remain available, with USDC positioned as an additional way for clients to collect money.

Tom Lang, head of Treasury Management Product and Operations at PNC Bank, said in the bank's release that clients are continually looking at new ways to interact and transact with customers, suppliers and business partners. Alec Lovett, head of Infrastructure Products at Coinbase, said in the same release that the work shows how leading banks and trusted digital asset infrastructure can come together to let corporate clients take advantage of the technology.

Why it matters

The pilot puts a large US bank into the flow of stablecoin payments without requiring its corporate customers to hold the tokens themselves. Because each incoming USDC is converted into dollars on receipt, clients get the settlement speed associated with blockchain transfers while their balances remain in conventional bank deposits. Coinbase framed the arrangement as a template for other banks that want to add stablecoins to services they already offer using its infrastructure.

The move also follows a similar step by another major bank. Citi expanded its Coinbase partnership in September to let institutional clients accept stablecoin payments through its Spring by Citi platform, with Coinbase converting those payments into fiat currency. PNC's pilot suggests the model is spreading among banks that prefer to convert stablecoins rather than hold them.

What the data shows

USDC is the second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization at $70.5 billion, behind Tether's USDT at $176.8 billion, according to DefiLlama data cited by Cointelegraph. The total stablecoin market stood at around $290.8 billion on Monday. Cointelegraph described PNC as the eighth-largest US bank by assets.

Background

The two companies first partnered in July 2025, when PNC agreed to provide some banking services to Coinbase and said it would build a product letting clients buy, hold and sell crypto through Coinbase's crypto-as-a-service platform. That partnership led to the launch of Bitcoin trading for eligible PNC Private Bank clients in December, according to Cointelegraph.

Corporate use of stablecoins remains a small part of the overall market. Nick van Eck, CEO and co-founder of stablecoin company Agora, said on Unchained's Bits + Bips in October that enterprise adoption of stablecoins is still minuscule, estimating that business-to-business stablecoin payments totaled about a quarter of a trillion dollars last year.

What is still unclear

PNC did not disclose fees, settlement-time benchmarks or the number of participating clients, and it did not respond to Cointelegraph's request for additional details before publication. Neither company said when the pilot might open to more clients.

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