Shinhan Financial Group (55550), one of South Korea’s five largest financial conglomerates, plans to build stablecoin infrastructure and develop AI-powered payment models alongside Visa, South Korean news outlet FNNews reported.
Seoul-based Shinhan intends to use Visa’s stablecoin platform to verify core functions, including issuance, remittance and redemption, while jointly designing a Korea-specific business model.
The deal marks the first time a South Korean top-tier financial group formally adopts Visa's enterprise stablecoin infrastructure, launched in July, to test a full domestic settlement stack. The agreement gives Visa a head start over Mastercard in bank-native stablecoin settlement infrastructure in South Korea. Mastercard's crypto partnerships in the country have so far stopped short of full stablecoin settlement integration.
Visa and Shinhan also plan to run pilot projects covering stablecoin integration into bank card payment settlement and the expansion of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) payments.
"We will combine Shinhan's financial capabilities with Visa's global infrastructure to jointly design new future finance models," said Jin Ok-dong, chairman of Shinhan Financial Group.
The deal comes as South Korea advances its Digital Asset Basic Act, a broad framework covering stablecoins, VASP licensing and crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
Shinhan, which has around 134 trillion won ($100 billion) in assets under management, has other crypto projects in the works. Its asset management division signed a four-party agreement with the Solana Foundation, Etherfuse and Orca to test a Korean won-denominated tokenized fund earlier this month, according to a Solana X post. Shinhan and Solana partnered in April to trial stablecoin payment systems.