PNC Bank Pilots USDC Payments for Corporate Clients via Coinbase
PNC Bank has opened a limited pilot letting eligible corporate and institutional clients get paid in USDC. Coinbase converts incoming tokens one-to-one into dollars deposited in a PNC account. Fees and client numbers were not disclosed.
Eligible clients of PNC Bank's Corporate and Institutional Banking unit can now get paid in USDC without holding the stablecoin, under a pilot built on Coinbase technology that the two companies announced on Monday.
The USDC travels on Ethereum, and Coinbase Payments products and Payment APIs handle the stablecoin side. Each incoming token is converted one-to-one into dollars and deposited into a designated PNC account. PNC supplies the bank account, its treasury management services and its corporate client relationships. The bank says the aim is faster access to funds and more efficient cross-border payments.
USDC is a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin issued by Circle.
"Our clients are continually looking at new ways to interact and transact with customers, suppliers and business partners,"
The statement came from Tom Lang of PNC Bank, in a PNC release. Alec Lovett of Coinbase said in the same release that the pilot "shows how leading banks and trusted digital asset infrastructure come together to let corporate clients take advantage of this technology."
Limited disclosure
The pilot is limited to select clients. PNC did not disclose fees, settlement-time benchmarks or the number of participating clients, and did not answer press questions seeking those details. Neither company said when the program might open to more clients. Coinbase framed the pilot as a template for other banks adding stablecoins.
Building on a 2025 partnership
The program extends a partnership announced in July 2025, when PNC, the eighth-largest U.S. bank by assets, agreed to offer crypto services through Coinbase's infrastructure and provide some banking services to the exchange. That arrangement led to Bitcoin trading for eligible PNC Private Bank clients in December.
Market context
PNC is not the only large bank working with Coinbase on stablecoin payments. Citi expanded its Coinbase partnership in September so institutional clients can accept stablecoin payments through Spring by Citi, with Coinbase converting to fiat.
USDC's market capitalization stands at $70.5 billion, second to USDT at $176.8 billion, in a stablecoin market of about $290.8 billion, according to DefiLlama data.
Corporate demand remains an open question. Nick van Eck, CEO of Agora, said:
"The enterprise adoption of stablecoins is still minuscule,"
