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SBI Remit Co., Ltd. (“SBI Remit”; head office: Minato-ku, Tokyo; Representative Director: Nobuo Ando) is pleased to announce the start today of Japan’s first international money transfer service using crypto-assets. Covering the Philippines, the service is provided via SBI VC Trade Co., Ltd. (“SBI VC Trade”; head office: Minato-ku, Tokyo; CEO: Fuminori Ozaki) and Ripple Labs, Inc. (“Ripple”; head office: San Francisco, US; CEO: Brad Garlinghouse). SBI Remit is an international money transfer service provider and a subsidiary of SBI FinTech Solutions Co., Ltd., a comprehensive provider of financial technology (fintech) solutions. SBI VC Trade is an SBI Group company that provides crypto-asset exchange services. Ripple, a business partner of SBI Holdings, Inc., has developed and currently operates a next-generation payments platform using blockchain technology.

SBI Remit has been using RippleNet, Ripple’s global money transfer solution, since 2017. Now we have, for the first time in Japan, commenced remittance services based on Ripple’s On-Demand Liquidity, ODL(^*1) system using the crypto-asset XRP(^*2). SBI Remit transmits customers’ remittance requests to SBI VC Trade, which in turn provides the infrastructure for making real-time XRP remittances based on the requests.

As our partner on the receiving side in the Philippines, we have formed an alliance with Coins.ph, a product of Betur Inc. (head office: Pasig, the Philippines; CEO: Nauman Mustafa), which operates fund transfer and crypto-asset exchange businesses in the Philippines. Through this, it will be possible to receive XRP through the XRP Ledger and exchange it for Philippine pesos, the country’s legal currency, allowing recipient customers to receive remittances in local currency.

Based on the aforesaid scheme, we will add recipients receiving payments through Coins.ph to our current selection of potential recipients in the Philippines for international payments, thereby offering more options for making remittances to the Philippines. By making use of the crypto-asset XRP, the scheme also allows us to take advantage of the considerable XRP liquidity of SBI VC Trade to reduce our prefunding and other money-transfer costs, thereby leading to greater competitiveness in the international remittance service market.

In the future, we hope to offer a greater variety of receiving methods for remittances to the Philippines and extend our services to other countries, particularly in Southeast Asia. At the same time, we will strive to expand joint operations with Ripple, our business partner.

(*1) ODL: Global payment system using XRP Ledger, a blockchain technology developed by Ripple. By using XRP as a vehicle currency, financial institutions can eliminate the need to procure local currency funds in advance. It minimizes fees and allows transactions to be completed more quickly.

(*2) XRP: Digital asset used by RippleNet, an international remittance platform. XRP has a throughput of 1,500 transactions per second and the capacity to complete transactions in four seconds. It is intended to eliminate prefunding costs and reduce foreign exchange risks for remittance service providers.