Citi and Coinbase Bring Stablecoin Checkout to Corporate Clients

Citigroup and Coinbase said on September 28 that businesses processing payments through Citi will be able to accept stablecoins at checkout and still settle in fiat. The two companies announced the expanded collaboration on Monday, pairing Citi's regulated banking rails with Coinbase payments infrastructure.

The checkout feature sits inside Spring by Citi, the bank's platform for merchant acquiring, gateway services and settlement. When a buyer pays in stablecoins, Coinbase infrastructure converts the tokens to fiat, and Citi credits the merchant as the bank of record. Merchants do not hold, custody or manage digital assets directly, according to the release.

The companies said the setup opens merchants to more than 150 million people worldwide who hold stablecoins. Unchained reported the same figure in its account of the announcement, which it posted Monday evening.

A second piece of the deal runs in the other direction. Coinbase selected Citi's Virtual Account Wallet, sold through the bank's banking-as-a-service business, as the banking layer for Coinbase Virtual Accounts. Payments customers building on Coinbase get bank-account-like functions to accept, hold and pay out funds, with incoming fiat converted into stablecoins automatically. The release describes that automatic conversion as an industry first.

Shahmir Khaliq, Citi's head of services, said the partnership advances the bank's Services strategy and gives clients "optionality" as they enter the digital economy, in the release. The bank framed the work as part of a Services strategy to connect traditional banking with blockchain networks across cash management, securities and collateral.

"Clients building on Coinbase have always needed a fast, compliant bridge between fiat and stablecoins, and Citi gives us that at scale," Alec Lovett, head of infrastructure product at Coinbase, said in the same announcement. He said shared customers will be able to move between fiat and digital assets without managing either system themselves.

Citi says it moves about $6 trillion a day, a figure Unchained noted in its coverage. The bank says it does business in more than 180 countries and jurisdictions, banks 90 percent of the top eCommerce companies and counts 15 of the world's 20 largest financial technology firms as clients, according to the release. Markets Media described the pairing as a single path between traditional finance and digital assets for businesses building on Coinbase.

Several practical details remain undisclosed. The products will roll out in the United States first, but neither company gave a launch date or pricing, and the announcements did not name the stablecoins or blockchains involved. That gap in the rollout specifics was reported alongside the Monday announcement.

For clients building on Coinbase, the companies point to concrete uses: branded virtual accounts backed by regulated banking rails, automatic conversion with no separate treasury workflow, and fiat settlement while customers pay in the currency of their choice, as described in the Markets Media account of the deal.

Ashish Bajaj, Citi's head of Services for North America, said the goal is payments infrastructure that operates across traditional and digital payment instruments and networks, calling it a way of enabling the future of commerce in the present, according to the release. The bank places the Coinbase work inside a wider digital-payments push that also includes Spring by Citi, its banking-as-a-service offering and a newly integrated 24/7 dollar clearing and token-services product for round-the-clock cross-border payments.

The collaboration builds on an earlier round. Citi and Coinbase first teamed up in October 2025 on moving client money between fiat and crypto, and the companies said Monday they will add more features in the coming months. Citi is also one of 21 banks and asset managers that said on September 1 they would form a company to issue a dollar stablecoin, with a target of the first half of 2027.

"Citi is exactly the kind of regulated banking partner the digital asset economy needs to move from experimentation to everyday commerce," Brett Tejpaul, head of Coinbase Institutional, said in the release. Both companies said additional capabilities will follow the United States rollout.