Citi and Coinbase Expand Collaboration to Connect Digital and Fiat Payments

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• Citi and Coinbase launched Coinbase Virtual Accounts, powered by Citi’s Virtual Account Wallet Banking-as-a-Service platform, giving Coinbase payment customers bank-like functionality with automatic fiat-to-stablecoin conversion
• Through Spring by Citi, institutional clients can accept stablecoin payments at checkout, with Citi handling automatic conversion to fiat and settlement as the bank of record
• The expanded collaboration launches first in the United States and is designed to let merchants serve more than 150 million stablecoin holders globally

Citi and Coinbase announced in a press release published on Citi’s corporate website on September 28, 2026 that they are expanding their partnership to connect digital and fiat payments for both corporations and consumers, under the headline “Citi and Coinbase Expand Collaboration to Connect Digital and Fiat Payments for Corporations and Consumers.”

The first component, Coinbase Virtual Accounts, is powered by Citi’s Virtual Account Wallet, a Banking-as-a-Service offering that gives Coinbase payment customers bank-like account functionality, including automatic conversion between fiat currency and stablecoins. The second, offered through Spring by Citi, lets institutional clients accept stablecoin payments directly at checkout; Citi automatically converts those payments to fiat and settles them as the bank of record, letting merchants that plug into Spring serve what the release describes as more than 150 million stablecoin holders worldwide without having to manage crypto custody or conversion themselves.

“Our goal is to build the next generation of payments infrastructure” that is “seamless, interoperable, and operates across both traditional and digital payments,” said Ashish Bajaj, Citi’s head of services for North America, in the release. Alec Lovett, Coinbase’s head of infrastructure product, said “Citi gives us that at scale” by powering Virtual Accounts with “regulated banking infrastructure,” while Brett Tejpaul, head of Coinbase Institutional, called Citi “exactly the kind of regulated banking partner the digital asset economy needs.”

The expanded collaboration launches first in the United States, with the companies saying further capabilities are planned as the partnership continues. The structure reflects a pattern increasingly common among large banks entering the stablecoin space: rather than issuing their own token, Citi is providing the regulated banking rails, conversion, and settlement layer that sits underneath a crypto-native company’s stablecoin infrastructure, letting each side focus on what it already does at scale.

For merchants, the pitch is straightforward: accept stablecoin payments from a large and growing base of holders without taking on the operational or balance-sheet complexity of holding crypto directly, since Citi converts and settles in fiat automatically. As more large banks strike similar arrangements with crypto exchanges and payment processors, the line between a “crypto payment” and a conventional bank-settled transaction is likely to keep blurring from the merchant’s point of view, even as the underlying rails differ substantially from traditional card networks.