1st September 2026
By Cyrus Tong
On August 25, 2026, Visa announced its participation in BLOOM (Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multi-currency), the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s initiative to extend settlement capabilities across tokenised bank liabilities and regulated stablecoins.
The announcement contains a detail that deserves more attention than it has received in most coverage.
Visa is not simply the latest institution to join a growing consortium.
It is the first major card network to participate in a central bank-supervised stablecoin settlement framework anywhere in the world.
That is not an incremental development.
It is a structural signal about where the global payments industry is heading, and how the compliance architecture supporting it is being designed.
What BLOOM Actually Is, and How It Was Built
The Monetary Authority of Singapore launched BLOOM on October 16, 2025, building on Project Orchid’s foundation to extend settlement in tokenised bank liabilities and well-regulated stablecoins, whilst effectively managing risks through standardised approaches.
The original participants at launch included Circle, Coinbase, DBS, OCBC, UOB, Partior, Stripe, Ant International, and Straits, a coalition that combined Singapore’s major domestic banks with global stablecoin infrastructure providers and payment platforms.
Ripple joined in March 2026, piloting RLUSD on the XRP Ledger for trade finance settlement. Maybank Singapore joined in early August 2026.
Visa’s entry on August 25, 2026, adds the world’s largest card network to the coalition.
The progression from Singapore’s domestic banks to Visa is not coincidental.
It is the sequencing of a deliberately constructed regulatory experiment, one in which the MAS established the compliance architecture first and expanded institutional participation as that architecture matured.
BLOOM’s design is regulatory rather than technical.
MAS brings financial institutions and fintechs together under standardised approaches to risk management and compliance, with the regulator itself functioning as the orchestrating authority.
The distinction matters enormously for compliance professionals.
Most private-sector stablecoin infrastructure is built around technical interoperability, getting different blockchain networks and payment systems to communicate.
BLOOM is built around regulatory interoperability, ensuring that when they communicate, the compliance, risk management, and reporting obligations travel with the transaction.
The Visa-Nium Pilot and What 7-Day Settlement Actually Means
As part of its BLOOM participation, Visa named Nium as its first pilot partner for stablecoin settlement.
The two companies will explore how stablecoins can make cross-border money movements more efficient while continuing to use Visa’s existing payment network as well as its security and compliance capabilities.
A key focus is settlement outside conventional banking hours;
The pilot will examine whether stablecoins can enable settlement seven days a week, including weekends and public holidays.
Seven-day settlement is not a marginal efficiency improvement.
It is a structural redesign of how financial institutions manage liquidity, counterparty exposure, and operational risk across international payment corridors.
Current cross-border settlement infrastructure operates on business day cycles.
Funds sent on Friday afternoon in Singapore may not settle in a recipient account in the UAE, Europe, or Latin America until Tuesday, after the weekend gap in processing and any Monday public holidays are accounted for.
For corporate treasuries managing working capital across multiple jurisdictions, this represents a liquidity cost that is real, measurable, and largely invisible to the end customer who simply experiences it as delay.
Nium made this concrete in April 2026 when it integrated Coinbase’s infrastructure to support USDC payouts across its network.
The integration allowed businesses to fund cross-border payouts on demand using USDC, settling in either stablecoin or local fiat at the point of payout, eliminating the need to prefund receiving-currency accounts in advance.
The Visa-Nium pilot under BLOOM takes that operational proof of concept into an MAS-supervised framework, adding the regulatory oversight, standardised compliance approaches, and central bank authority that institutional adoption at scale requires.
The Programmable Compliance Architecture
The compliance dimension of BLOOM that receives the least coverage is also the most important one for practitioners.
BLOOM introduces a standardised approach to settlement asset oversight, integrating governance, risk management, and regulatory reporting directly into transaction protocols.
The use of programmable compliance establishes a model where AML/CFT and cross-border regulatory checks are embedded at the technical level, ensuring compliance continuity even as financial instruments evolve.
This is a fundamentally different compliance architecture from the one most financial institutions currently operate.
In traditional payment infrastructure, compliance checks are applied to transactions as an additional layer; screening happens before or after the transaction, not within it.
The transaction and the compliance function are separate systems that interact with each other.
Programmable compliance embeds the check into the transaction itself.
The AML screening, the sanctions verification, the counterparty risk assessment- these become conditions of settlement rather than reviews of it.
A transaction that fails a compliance condition does not proceed.
There is no manual review queue, no post-settlement remediation, no gap between execution and oversight.
For compliance functions, this changes both the work and the skill set required.
Building compliance programmes for programmable settlement infrastructure requires understanding how compliance logic is encoded at the protocol level, not just how to apply policies to transaction records after the fact.
My Take
I have spent over two decades building compliance frameworks across APAC and international markets.
And Visa’s entry into BLOOM is the clearest institutional signal yet that the integration of stablecoin rails with traditional payment infrastructure is moving from regulatory experiment to operational reality.
What strikes me most is not the 7-day settlement capability, impressive as that is, but the compliance architecture that Singapore has built around it.
MAS did not simply create a regulatory framework and wait for the market to adopt it.
It built BLOOM as a supervised experimental environment in which the compliance standards are established collectively, in real time, through actual transaction pilots involving regulated institutions.
That approach- compliance architecture co-developed with the institutions that will operate within it- is how frameworks are built that actually work in practice rather than looking credible on paper.
The BLOOM coalition now includes Visa, Nium, DBS, OCBC, UOB, Circle, Coinbase, Stripe, Ripple, Ant International, Maybank, and StraitsX.
When the world’s largest card network and Singapore’s three major domestic banks are all building settlement infrastructure under the same MAS-supervised compliance framework, the direction of travel for APAC digital payments is no longer uncertain.
Compliance functions in the region need to be building toward this now.
Not toward what BLOOM is today.
Toward what it will require when it becomes the standard.
About the author
Cyrus Tong, an award-winning compliance expert, is the Group Chief Compliance Officer of DCS Group.
