To ensure it’s giving large corporate customers the latest options, PNC has launched a pilot enabling corporate and institutional banking clients to accept stablecoin payments.  

Boosting stablecoin and blockchain capabilities has been an area of focus for PNC, said Mike Gallagher, chief operating officer of PNC’s treasury management segment. “We've been investing in that to make sure customers have optionality,” he said in a recent interview.  

Pittsburgh-based PNC said Monday it’s building on its existing relationship with Coinbase to offer stablecoin payments to the lender’s corporate and institutional banking clients. 

“Our clients are continually looking at new ways to interact and transact with customers, suppliers and business partners,” Tom Lang, PNC’s head of treasury management product and operations, said in a news release. “This solution gives us an opportunity to support our customers with innovative capabilities, backed by the banking experience, risk management and expertise clients expect from PNC.” 

As part of a pilot program, PNC’s corporate customers can receive payments in Circle’s USDC, a dollar-backed stablecoin, on the Ethereum blockchain. USDC payments are automatically converted 1-to-1 to U.S. dollars and deposited into a PNC deposit account, offering customers stablecoin payment benefits alongside access to the $627.8 billion-asset lender’s banking services, the release said. 

PNC seeks to add capabilities if clients are looking for them, “and the capabilities will come to match as the corporate needs emerge,” said Gallagher, who’s also president of Tempus Technologies, a payments company PNC acquired in 2021.

Those needs are emerging, but time will tell as to the level of demand, he added. 

“There's a lot of crypto curiosity out there in the world,” Gallagher said. “But the number of businesses that have really identified their stablecoin use case or how digital assets are going to fit into how they run their businesses is much more diminished.”

In talking to those on the crypto side, Gallagher said those players have realized they “need to get out of this technical, blockchain, crypto utopia thing that they end up talking about,” he said. They’ve “recognized what I think we've long understood, which is that the customers just want it to work.” 

Large companies are less interested in the technical details. “Corporates just want their payments to work,” Gallagher said. 

The bank wouldn’t disclose the number of companies participating in the pilot, which allows clients to receive incoming USDC payments only. Client demand and usage will help inform whether and when it may be scaled more broadly, a PNC spokesperson said.

Gallagher expects there will be some corridors where stablecoin payments make a difference, including in international trade payments and currency-to-currency transactions. 

In other areas, though, it may be “new and shiny, but it's hard to see how clients are going to actually solve a problem with it, versus becoming a proliferation of one more way to send or receive payments,” Gallagher said.

The stablecoin pilot allows PNC to learn more from customers, since the bank doesn’t want to build new components just for the sake of it, but aims to stay focused on offering capabilities that actually help large companies, he said.

If they can use it, “let's figure out the best way to help it solve your business, and then we can adapt to the real need,” he said. 

Gallagher said he’s eager to see which of the bank’s clients gravitate toward the feature. 

“There will be some corporates who are just looking to also show that they can accept a variety of payment rails, who will be eager to adopt it even if they don’t know exactly why someone would choose that over another,” he said. 

Meeting client expectations for seamless, consumer-like digital experiences has been a point of focus for the bank’s treasury management segment, Gallagher said. 

Increasingly, “people who work at corporates are looking at their experience on the job at work and wondering, why can't this be as simple as the experience I have personally?” 

Embedding bank experiences directly into clients’ existing workflows has also been a priority, to “make available the tooling for the customers to be able to just hook right into our systems, and they never have to swivel … over to the bank portal, unless they want to,” Gallagher said.