ACI Worldwide and Circle Pilot USDC Alongside Colombia’s Bre-B Through Connetic, Outside Its Central Infrastructure
Oct. 28, 2026 • Article • Digital Assets
ACI Worldwide and Circle announced a pilot on October 27, 2026, involving USDC and connectivity to Colombia’s Bre-B instant payments system. The integration runs through ACI Connetic, a payments orchestration platform, rather than embedding USDC in Bre-B’s central infrastructure. There is no indication that Colombia’s central bank has adopted USDC as a settlement asset for the national network.
The distinction matters because ACI also supplies technology for Bre-B’s central directory and real-time clearing engine. Bre-B launched in October 2025 and handled more than 500 million transactions within five months. Connetic is designed to bring traditional payment rails and digital asset networks together without requiring banks to replace legacy core ledgers. ACI says the platform can support other digital assets and liquidity providers, so the pilot does not make USDC its exclusive option. The arrangement tests a vendor-level connection alongside an established public payment system, not a change to that system’s settlement rules.
ACI Worldwide and Circle announced a pilot on October 27, 2026, involving Circle’s USDC and connectivity to Colombia’s Bre-B instant payments system. The test runs through ACI Connetic, a payments orchestration platform, rather than placing USDC in Bre-B’s central infrastructure. That distinction is central to understanding the announcement: the companies are testing how a digital asset network can sit alongside an established national payment rail, not reporting that the rail has adopted a stablecoin for settlement.
ACI has a separate role in Bre-B’s infrastructure, which helps explain the attention around the pilot. Colombia’s national instant payments system uses ACI Worldwide’s Digital Central Infrastructure for its central directory and real-time clearing engine. The USDC test, however, is at the Connetic vendor-orchestration layer alongside connectivity to Bre-B. The information available about the pilot does not establish USDC as a central bank-mandated or formally adopted settlement asset within Bre-B.
Where the Pilot Sits
ACI Connetic is designed to bring different payment methods and networks together. Its scope includes traditional account-to-account rails, card payments and digital asset networks. As a cloud-native orchestration engine, it is intended to let participating banks use those connections without overhauling their legacy core ledgers.
Orchestration is distinct from the operation of a payment system’s central clearing infrastructure. A platform can coordinate access to several networks without changing the rules or settlement arrangements of any one network. In this case, ACI’s involvement in both Connetic and Bre-B-related infrastructure should not be read as evidence that the USDC pilot changes how Bre-B itself settles payments.
ACI has also specified that Connetic is technology-agnostic. It is built to support multiple alternative digital assets and liquidity providers, rather than being exclusive to Circle’s USDC. The announced pilot therefore illustrates one possible use of the platform, not a commitment to make USDC its sole digital asset option.
Bre-B’s Scale and Governance
Bre-B went live on October 6, 2025. Within five months of deployment, it had handled more than 500 million transactions and surpassed 100 million registered payment keys across 33 million unique users. Those figures describe a payment network that had already reached substantial scale before the ACI-Circle pilot was announced.
A payment key is an identifier registered for use with the instant payments system; the reported count of keys is separate from the count of unique users. The network’s scale makes the boundary between its central infrastructure and an outside orchestration service particularly important when assessing claims about integration.
Bre-B is operated and regulated by Colombia’s central bank, Banco de la República, and supervised by the Superintendencia Financiera de Colombia. Its statutory roadmap extends through 2029. Nothing in the available details says those authorities have designated USDC as a settlement asset for Bre-B. Describing the arrangement as a test alongside the national rail, rather than a change to that rail, preserves that distinction.
Circle’s Regional Context and Next Steps
Circle has been expanding its Latin American presence ahead of the pilot. Its regional activity includes integrating USDC into fintech ecosystems such as Argentina’s Mercado Pago, with a focus on demand for remittances and dollar-denominated savings. That background helps explain Circle’s interest in payment connectivity in the region, but it does not establish a new consumer product or a live Bre-B payment service arising from this test.
Craig Ramsey heads global account-to-account payments at ACI Worldwide, while Kash Razzaghi is Circle’s chief commercial officer. Their roles place the announcement within the companies’ respective payments and commercial businesses; the available information does not attribute a statement about the pilot’s results to either executive.
Circle has scheduled its third-quarter 2026 earnings webcast for November 4, 2026, when executive management is expected to address its Latin American expansion and core banking integration initiatives. That is a prospective discussion, not confirmation of an outcome for the pilot. Circle shares dipped more than 1% in early trading following the joint announcement. For now, the supported development is a vendor-level USDC connectivity test alongside Bre-B—not adoption of USDC by Colombia’s sovereign instant payment system.
Mastercard and Visa are extending stablecoin technology into the systems that settle card payments between financial institutions, while leaving the consumer checkout experience largely unchanged. Mastercard completed its acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure provider BVNK in August 2026 and has expanded its network’s settlement options to include regulated stablecoins. Visa, meanwhile, is working with Stripe-owned Bridge and Lead Bank on on-chain settlement for card programs. The shift became more concrete in September, when SoFi Bank moved its credit and debit card issuing portfolio to live settlement using its bank-issued SoFiUSD. That portfolio represents more than $25 billion in annualized card volume, a measure distinct from the value settled in stablecoins. Visa separately reported an annualized stablecoin settlement run rate exceeding $25 billion in October. The networks’ initiatives target the back-end movement and reconciliation of funds, including periods when traditional bank settlement rails are unavailable; they do not require merchants to accept cryptocurrency.
The European Central Bank has launched Pontes, a bridge connecting tokenised-asset platforms to the Eurosystem’s TARGET Services for wholesale settlement in central bank money. The arrangement enables atomic delivery-versus-payment settlement, in which an asset and its payment move together. It does not yet make wholesale settlement available around the clock: Pontes depends on T2 operating hours and requires tokenised central bank money balances to be defunded at the end of the day. ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone says the Eurosystem plans to extend Pontes operating hours substantially by mid-2027 and reach 24/7/365 availability in 2028. Separately, the Bank for International Settlements’ Project Agorá has tested cross-border payments using a shared programmable ledger that brings tokenised commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves into a single settlement process. Both initiatives address delays and liquidity demands in wholesale payments, but neither makes continuous, cross-border settlement available today.
Project Agorá’s real-value testing settled 30 live, multi-currency transactions worth approximately CHF 800,000, with atomic settlement averaging about 80 seconds. The tests involved 28 commercial institutions and five central banks. The result shows how tokenised commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves could support faster cross-border settlement, though it does not establish that settlement latency has been eliminated. The project’s prototype found that tokenisation did not change the legal character or regulatory obligations of deposits and reserves. Its design also let participating institutions conduct compliance checks concurrently. Seven more commercial banks joined in September 2026, taking private-sector participation to nearly 50 institutions. At Sibos in October, banking executives described the testing pipeline as a step towards production trials alongside the European Central Bank’s Pontes platform. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York did not participate in the live test transactions, an important qualification for the US dollar tests.
Ripple’s final federal trust bank charter, a Moody’s investment-grade rating for RLUSD and a planned expansion of the stablecoin’s availability on Coinbase have strengthened its position as a regulated digital dollar. Coinbase said Global Exchange access, including eligibility to use RLUSD as trading collateral, will follow its initial retail and prime rollout. Moody’s assigned RLUSD an A2 long-term deposit rating and a P-1 short-term rating, the first investment-grade rating it has given a stablecoin. The distinctions behind those developments matter. Ripple National Trust Bank manages RLUSD’s reserve collateral, but the legal issuer remains Standard Custody & Trust Company, a New York-regulated Ripple subsidiary. The national trust bank is uninsured and cannot take commercial retail deposits or extend credit. Moody’s also noted that holders do not currently own the underlying reserves directly and that statutory bankruptcy protections depend on implementation of the GENIUS Act, whose rules take effect in January 2027.
Ramp partnered with Stripe and Bridge in July 2026 to deploy stablecoin rails for business bill payments and yield-bearing stablecoin accounts funded through standard fiat bank accounts. The arrangement shows how stablecoins can be incorporated into familiar payment workflows without requiring businesses to fund every transaction with digital assets. The economics depend on more than the cost of moving a token on-chain. Stripe charges merchants 1.5% for stablecoin checkout transactions, versus its standard card-processing fee of 2.9% plus $0.30; neither figure establishes the price of Ramp’s bill-payment service. Businesses receiving fiat may also face foreign-exchange and off-ramp costs, typically 0.3% to 2.0% when converting into local banking systems. Domestic clearing networks and compliance checks remain part of end-to-end delivery. Bridge’s issuance and transfer tools, alongside its conditional U.S. trust-bank approval, illustrate the infrastructure behind those payments—but not the elimination of every payment cost.
StraitsX has opened onboarding for digital payment token providers across more than 100 markets through an expanded card-issuing architecture developed with Visa. Integration documentation published on 26 October 2026 describes a multi-BIN model that combines issuing sponsorship, transaction authorization, compliance screening and fiat clearing. The approach lets participating providers build stablecoin-backed card products while merchants continue to receive conventional fiat payments through Visa’s network. StraitsX says its card gross transaction value rose 40-fold year on year from Q4 2024 to Q4 2025, while cards issued across Asia increased 83-fold. On-chain issuer telemetry recorded monthly card transaction volume of $310 million to $438 million through October 2026. The company’s stated $6 billion annualized card transaction figure is distinct from its cumulative $70 billion in processed stablecoin volume. StraitsX and Visa have also scheduled demonstrations of agentic payments for November 2026.