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- Yoshitaka Kitao, CEO of SBI Holding and member of the board of Ripple, suggested that Ripple should seek to partner with multinational companies in the supply chain in addition to financial institutions.
- According to Kitao, the number of cross-border payments could grow exponentially as a result.
The Japanese financial giant SBI Holdings is known to be one of Ripple’s biggest supporters and has now proposed a new way to exponentially accelerate Ripple‘s growth. As part of the joint venture between SBI Holdings and Ripple, SBI Ripple Asia, both companies have so far provided financial institutions and remittance providers in Asia with an XRP based payment platform called MoneyTap. The service is intended to be used by 61 Japanese banks, representing more than 80% of total Japanese bank assets.
During an SBI Group conference call, Yoshitaka Kitao, CEO of SBI Holding, has now suggested that Ripple should not only aim to partner with financial institutions. Instead, he suggested that Ripple could also drive other multinational companies in the supply chain with its technology. With regard to the COVID-19 pandemic, Kitao, who has also been a board member of Ripple since April 2019, stated that his lawyers will attend the next board meeting of Ripple.
According to Kitao, during the meeting they will introduce the idea that Ripple should enter into new partnerships with multinational companies such as Big Shosha, a Japanese trading company. With regard to Japan’s handling of the coronavirus, Kitao said that on the one hand the use of blockchain technology in the supply chain is an urgent topic, and on the other hand the number of transactions could grow exponentially due to this other application beyond the financial industry:
By adding multinational companies to the Ripple network and not just financial institutions we can expect [the number of cross-border payments]to grow exponentially.
SBI Holding continues to build on Ripple
In the presentation of the financial results of SBI Holding, the Japanese financial giant also pointed out that the cooperation with Ripple will be further expanded within the scope of the SBI Remit project to simplify cross-border payments:
Beginning the provision of an international wire transfer service by SBI Remit to provide a highly convenient international wire transfer service using Ripple, Inc.’s Distributed Ledger technology for foreign residents in the prefecture.
However, in January 2019, SBI Holding also entered into a partnership with Ripple’s competitor R3 Corda. The financial services giant and R3 blockchain consortium have formed a joint venture to promote the adoption of R3’s Corda platform in Japan and beyond. In this regard, the financial results’ presentation stated that SBI is well positioned to become the “de facto next generation standard” through the two collaborations with R3 Corda and Ripple:
The SBI Group can be the de facto next generation standard through the intensified cooperation with the US companies R3 and Ripple in the context of investments and joint venture formations.
