At a glance
- PNC Bank has opened a pilot that lets eligible corporate and institutional clients receive payments in USDC on Ethereum, with each token converted one-for-one into US dollars and deposited in a PNC account.
- Coinbase’s payment products run the stablecoin side. Neither company has said what the service costs, how many clients are in the pilot or when it will widen.
PNC Bank is making incoming USDC payments available to clients of its Corporate & Institutional Banking unit through a limited pilot built on Coinbase’s payment products, the Pittsburgh lender said on Monday.
The flow is one-way. A client’s customer or supplier sends USDC, the dollar stablecoin issued by Circle, on the Ethereum blockchain. The tokens are automatically converted into dollars at one-to-one and land in a designated PNC deposit account, so the client sees an ordinary dollar balance.
PNC pitches it as faster access to funds and cheaper cross-border collections. It sits alongside the bank’s existing instant-payment options rather than replacing them.
“Stablecoins are modernizing how businesses move money by making payments faster, more efficient and more global,” Alec Lovett, head of infrastructure products at Coinbase, said in the release.
Tom Lang, who runs treasury management products at PNC, told Reuters that the pilot is “about testing and learning with our clients.”
What changes for businesses
For a corporate client, the change is on the receiving end only: it can now quote a USDC address to payers abroad and still be settled in dollars at its own bank. There is nothing in the release about sending USDC out.
What the release leaves open is the plumbing in between. PNC did not disclose fees, settlement-time targets or the number of participating clients, Cointelegraph reported. It also does not say who holds the tokens, and earns the float, in the moments between receipt and conversion.
The pilot extends a relationship that began in July 2025, when PNC agreed to use Coinbase’s crypto-as-a-service platform and to provide banking services to the exchange, The Block noted. Eligible PNC private-banking clients got spot bitcoin trading in December 2025. Citi expanded its own Coinbase partnership for stablecoin collections in September, the outlet added.
The same Monday, Coinbase won final approval for its national trust bank from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. For the basics, see what a dollar stablecoin is; for the consumer side of the same trend, Samsung Wallet’s USDC account went live last week.
PNC says it is offering the service to eligible clients on a limited basis for now, and has given no date for a wider rollout.
This article is for information only and is not investment advice.