PNC Lets Corporate Clients Take USDC Payments, Paid Out in Dollars

PNC Bank's corporate clients can now get paid in USDC and find U.S. dollars in their account. The Pittsburgh bank announced the pilot on Monday, Nov. 9, built on Coinbase's payment products.

For a business with customers or suppliers abroad, it's a way to accept a digital dollar without holding crypto. Incoming USDC on Ethereum is converted 1-to-1 into dollars and deposited into a designated PNC account, the bank said.

How the payment works

USDC is a stablecoin, a token meant to hold a steady $1 value. Its issuer, Circle, calls it "a fully reserved digital dollar" on its USDC page. A payer sends the token over a blockchain at any hour, and stablecoins can be sent and received almost instantly, Reuters noted. In PNC's setup, the client never ends up holding the token: Coinbase handles the crypto side and PNC books the dollars.

About $70.4 billion of USDC was in circulation on Monday, per DefiLlama.

"Right now, this is about testing and learning with our clients," Tom Lang, PNC's head of Treasury Management product and operations, told Reuters. Alec Lovett, Coinbase's head of infrastructure products, said in the release that stablecoins make business payments "faster, more efficient and more global."

Built on an older deal

PNC first tied up with Coinbase in July 2025 and began offering spot bitcoin trading to eligible private banking clients in December, The Block reported. This pilot is open only to eligible corporate and institutional clients. Neither company disclosed fees, the clients taking part or volumes.

In our opinion: the detail worth chasing is the fee. PNC hasn't said what it charges to turn a stablecoin into a deposit, and that price decides whether a treasury team picks USDC over a wire. The pilot only covers money coming in, so the next real step to watch is whether PNC lets clients send USDC out.