BBVA announced that is one of the first banks in Visa’s global network to use VTAP, a new Visa platform that enables financial institutions to create and manage digital tokens backed by fiat currencies such as the euro and the dollar. BBVA will use VTAP to create tokens on the public Ethereum blockchain with expected live pilots in 2025.
Visa has just unveiled its new Visa Tokenized Asset Platform (VTAP) to address the need to represent value with fiat currency equivalence within blockchain networks. As part of this vision, BBVA is one of the first banks in Visa’s global network of more than 15,000 financial institutions to partner with Visa to use VTAP.
BBVA has been working in the VTAP sandbox throughout this year and has been testing core VTAP sandbox functionalities including the issuance, transfer and redemption of a bank token on a testnet blockchain, as well as interactions of the token with smart contracts with the goal of launching an initial live pilot with select customers, starting in Europe, in 2025 on the public Ethereum blockchain.
Tokenized money is critical to further exploring the potential of blockchain to develop new financial products and services. Potential use cases include executing automated payments through smart contracts, managing complex credit lines, or making ‘tokenized’ treasury securities available to banking customers that can be settled in near real-time.
“We are proud to continue spearheading the exploration of tokenized solutions with Visa through its VTAP platform,” explains Francisco Maroto, Head of Blockchain and Digital Assets at BBVA. “This collaboration marks a significant milestone in our exploration of the potential of blockchain technology and will ultimately help enable us to broaden our banking services and expand the market with new financial solutions.”
VTAP facilitates smooth technical integration through APIs, which will enable BBVA to operate the platform efficiently and in real time. Over time, with one-time integrations, the APIs can facilitate seamless transactions across different blockchain networks. Interoperability and access to different networks that have emerged, is a crucial factor that will drive the adoption of blockchain technology by financial institutions.
“Visa has been at the forefront of digital payments for nearly sixty years, and with the introduction of our new Visa product, VTAP, we are once again setting the pace for the industry,” remarks Vanessa Colella, Global Head of Innovation and Digital Partnerships at Visa. “We’re excited to use our experience with tokenization to help banks seamlessly integrate blockchain technologies into their operations.”
BBVA has been exploring for years the potential of tokenizing traditional financial assets and services. In partnership with MAPFRE, the bank issued the first structured green bond based on smart contracts. Later, alongside BME and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), BBVA completed the first issue in Spain of a bond listed on a regulated market and registered on blockchain. For this second bond project, BBVA already introduced dollar tokenization in order to be able to execute settlements on the network throughout the life of the issue.
Banking 4.0 – „how was the experience for you”
„So many people are coming here to Bucharest, people that I see and interact on linkedin and now I get the change to meet them in person. It was like being to the Football World Cup but this was the World Cup on linkedin in payments and open banking.”
Many more interesting quotes in the video below:
