Shinhan Financial Signs With Visa to Test Stablecoin Card Settlement

Shinhan Financial Group signed an agreement with Visa at its Seoul headquarters on Wednesday to test stablecoin issuance, remittance and redemption on the card network's stablecoin platform. Card payments settled in stablecoins are part of the scope, along with business-to-business and consumer payments and a Korea-specific model still to be designed. Shinhan Bank, Shinhan Card and Jeju Bank are named as participants by The Block and crypto.news. No stablecoin has been chosen, no pilot size disclosed and no date set. It is a testing arrangement, and all four accounts located say so.

What the pilots cover

The verification work runs across issuance, transfer and redemption first. Beyond that sit cross-border remittance, named by The Crypto Times, settlement of card payments, payment models built on artificial intelligence, and the B2B and B2C payment businesses both firms already run. CoinDesk says the platform involved is the enterprise stablecoin service Visa launched in July. The other three accounts refer to it only as Visa's stablecoin platform, without naming a product.

Shinhan's chairman, Jin Ok-dong, signed with Visa president Chris Newkirk, according to The Crypto Times. Two sentences from Jin circulate. The Block and crypto.news carry the first identically.

"Through this agreement, we have expanded our long-standing partnership with Visa to the broader digital finance sector," Jin said.

CoinDesk carries a second sentence about combining Shinhan's capabilities with Visa's global infrastructure to jointly design new future finance models. The Crypto Times prints the same line without the word "jointly". The Block gives Jin's title as chief executive officer where the other three call him chairman.

Korean rules are still being drafted

No regime for won-denominated stablecoins is in force. The Digital Asset Basic Act, which would cover stablecoins, licensing for virtual-asset service providers and crypto exchange-traded funds, is still being written. crypto.news reports the Bank of Korea's position that banks should lead initial issuance through regulated consortiums, and that the Financial Services Commission is working toward a consolidated framework possibly during 2026. That leaves a bank signing a stablecoin agreement before the rules that would govern it exist.

Shinhan has run these tests before

This is not the group's first attempt. Shinhan Card ran stablecoin payment trials with the Solana Foundation in April, and in August the group's asset management arm signed a memorandum with the Solana Foundation, Etherfuse and Orca to test tokenized funds denominated in won. The Block carries both; CoinDesk carries the second. The country's first government-led stablecoin pilot ran earlier this year on a separate track.

On size, the accounts measure different things. The Block and crypto.news report quarterly net income of 1.82 trillion won, about $1.3 billion. CoinDesk instead cites roughly 134 trillion won, near $100 billion, under management. Neither contradicts the other.

What has not been said yet

CoinDesk alone frames the deal as the first formal adoption of Visa's enterprise stablecoin infrastructure by a top-tier South Korean financial group, and alone reads it as an advantage for Visa over Mastercard in bank-native settlement in Korea. Neither claim is corroborated elsewhere. It stands unverified.

No confirming release from either company was located in English at the time of writing; every account traces back to the Seoul signing. What would make this more than an announcement is a named token, a live corridor and a start date. None of the three has been given.