MoneyGram Launched a Visa Card That Spends USDC. Ripple’s Former Partner Chose Circle
Sam DaoduSat, September 12, 2026 at 2:04 PM GMT+3 5 min read
Quick Read
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MoneyGram's new Visa card lets customers spend USDC anywhere Visa is accepted, launching first in Colombia with Stellar handling settlement.
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MoneyGram choosing Circle's USDC reflects trust in its compliance record and Latin American liquidity, not a confirmed head-to-head rejection of Ripple's RLUSD.
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Ripple held an equity stake in MoneyGram from 2019 until their partnership dissolved in 2021 amid the SEC's legal case against Ripple.
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MoneyGram (NYSE:MGI) launched a Visa card on September 10 that lets customers spend USD Coin (CRYPTO:USDC) anywhere Visa (NYSE:V) is accepted, starting in Colombia. The choice is notable because MoneyGram previously worked with Ripple on cross-border payments, while Ripple now has its own dollar-backed stablecoin, RLUSD.
XRP (CRYPTO:XRP), Ripple's native token, trades at $1.34 as of September 11, 2026, leaving investors to weigh what Ripple's growing stablecoin business means for a token that has yet to benefit directly from every expansion of the company's payments business. So why did MoneyGram choose USDC over RLUSD, and does that choice expose a gap between Ripple's payments ambitions and demand for XRP?
What the Card Does and Where It Launches
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The product is a Visa card that draws its balance from a USDC wallet rather than a bank account, so a customer spends stablecoins at any merchant that already takes Visa. A stablecoin is a crypto token pegged to a currency, in USDC's case the US dollar, so the balance on the card doesn't swing with Bitcoin or Ethereum prices. MoneyGram runs the card program, with the infrastructure built on Rain for card issuance, Crossmint for wallet technology, and Stellar (CRYPTO:XLM) for settlement, while Visa handles the merchant network. MoneyGram Chairman and CEO Anthony Soohoo said the card gives customers "more freedom and control to manage their money, all in one place."
Colombia is the first market, and the card is available for now only as a digital card inside the MoneyGram app. MoneyGram plans to add a physical card and ATM withdrawals later in 2026, which turns the same USDC balance into cash at any Visa-linked ATM. Colombia is a heavy inbound-remittance corridor, and dollar-linked balances give recipients a way to hold value that the peso has struggled to hold on its behalf.
A remittance company builds a card because a transfer network alone doesn't put a customer in front of a merchant checkout. Cross-border rails move money between accounts and cash pickup points. Card rails reach the merchant, so pairing a USDC wallet with a Visa card lets the same dollars a family receives from abroad pay for groceries, fuel, or medicine without a second conversion step.
MoneyGram Was Ripple's Flagship Payments Partner
Ripple and MoneyGram were tied together beginning in 2019, when Ripple took an equity stake in the company and MoneyGram began using Ripple's cross-border product to source XRP for foreign-exchange settlement. MoneyGram was the most visible corporate use of XRP for payments during that stretch. The partnership ended in March 2021, during the SEC's case against Ripple over the sale of XRP.
MoneyGram has also worked with Stellar for years on separate payments infrastructure, and Stellar is part of the technology stack running this new USDC card. Ripple isn't part of that stack in any form, digital or referenced.
The USDC pick reflects trust in Circle (NYSE:CRCL) rather than a public verdict on RLUSD. Ripple hasn't said publicly that it pitched RLUSD to MoneyGram, and MoneyGram hasn't said it considered RLUSD, so neither company has put the two stablecoins side by side on the record. A product choice can read easily as a verdict on a competitor when the record doesn't actually support that reading.
Does MoneyGram's Choice Say Anything About RLUSD?
Picking USDC shows that MoneyGram trusts Circle's stablecoin and Circle's compliance work enough to attach the MoneyGram brand and a Visa relationship to it, and that USDC's liquidity in Latin America was deep enough to run a consumer card on. The choice doesn't show that RLUSD lost a bake-off, because no public bake-off has been reported.
A clear signal would be a MoneyGram executive saying on the record that the company evaluated RLUSD and picked USDC, or an RLUSD partner of similar reach switching to a different stablecoin and naming a reason. Neither has happened as of September 11, 2026. The answer to whether Ripple's former partner chose Circle over Ripple is that MoneyGram chose Circle, and any framing beyond that comes from the audience rather than either company.
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