Inside the Shinhan-Visa Deal: How South Korea’s Banking Giant Plans to Issue Stablecoins
South Korea’s Shinhan Financial Group has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Visa to explore issuing and settling stablecoins, marking the first time one of the country’s top-tier financial conglomerates has formally adopted Visa’s enterprise stablecoin infrastructure. The agreement was formalized in Seoul on August 26 by Shinhan Financial Chairman Jin Ok-dong and Visa President Chris Newkirk.
What Shinhan and Visa Actually Signed
The deal is a cooperation framework, not a launch. Shinhan will use Visa’s stablecoin infrastructure to test and verify the core mechanics of issuance, remittance, and redemption, while the two companies jointly design a stablecoin business model tailored specifically to South Korea’s regulatory environment rather than importing a model built for another market. Pilot work will extend into card payment settlement, AI-based future payment models, and expansion of Shinhan’s business-to-business and business-to-consumer payment operations. Several Shinhan subsidiaries are involved in the effort, including Shinhan Bank, Shinhan Card, and Jeju Bank.
Chairman Jin Ok-dong described the tie-up as an extension of an existing relationship: “Through this agreement, we have expanded our long-standing partnership with Visa to the broader digital finance sector.” Neither company has disclosed which specific stablecoin will be used in testing, how large the pilot will be, or when live testing begins — this is groundwork, not a product investors can buy into yet.
The Platform Behind the Pilot
The infrastructure Shinhan is adopting is Visa’s own Stablecoin Platform, an enterprise system the company launched in July aimed at giving its network of roughly 15,000 financial institutions and more than 200 million merchants a single environment to mint, move, and manage stablecoins. Visa has been positioning stablecoins as connective infrastructure between banks’ on-chain entry points and existing payment demand, leaning on its dominant share of crypto-linked card transaction volume to secure an early foothold as banks around the world start experimenting with the technology.
Why a South Korean Banking Giant Is Moving Now
Shinhan is not new to blockchain-based payment experiments — its card unit has previously tested stablecoin-style payments on a public blockchain network in an earlier, smaller pilot. But this agreement is a step up in scale and formality: it’s a group-level deal spanning banking, card, and regional banking subsidiaries, timed to South Korea’s broader push to build domestic stablecoin rules as regulators there weigh how won-denominated and dollar-denominated stablecoins should coexist with the banking system. For Shinhan, which reported net income of roughly 1.82 trillion won (about $1.3 billion) last quarter, getting an early seat at the infrastructure layer could matter more than any single product launch — it positions the group to shape how stablecoin settlement actually works inside Korean finance rather than adopting rules set elsewhere.
Corporate stablecoin pilots are still an early-stage and evolving area of finance, and details of this specific program may change before any public rollout; nothing here is financial advice. To learn how stablecoins work and how they differ from Bitcoin, visit the Bitcoin Academy.