Japan’s SBI Holdings Forms Alliance with Fukushima to Use Ripple’s MoneyTap


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Japan’s SBI Holdings Forms Alliance with Fukushima to Use Ripple’s MoneyTap

Japanese business and financial services company SBI Holdings Inc. has announced its decision to form a capital and business alliance with Fukushima Bank, to achieve several goals including increasing profitability for financial institutions in general, as well as improving local customer assets and productivity of related companies. The alliance will also see Fukushima Bank incorporating MoneyTap payment app, which is powered by Ripple.

The general goal of improving business services, customer satisfaction and also cutting expenditure significantly, is borne out of the fact that more than 40% of Japanese regional banks currently find it hard to turn in any profit.

Fukushima Bank is one of about 45 regional banks out of the country’s 105, which have not pulled in any profits for the second consecutive year, because of Japan’s very strict financial statutes. The central bank of Japan’s efforts at controlling the country’s financial clime has been somewhat unfavorable for these banks, and has exerted pressure on them. Hopefully, the integration of MoneyTap would solve this problem.

Launched back in the first quarter of last year by the Japan Bank Consortium, MoneyTap is a payment app powered by Ripple, that lets people run money transfers very easily simply with QR codes and phone numbers.

The platform has been very successful and continues to welcome more institutions including Kita-Nippon and Awa, which were both added in September, making a total of 29 institutions on the platform.

Ripple is still making giant strides regarding its partnerships with financial organizations that use the company’s payment offerings, as well as its XRP cryptocurrency. At Ripple’s recent Swell 2019 conference, MoneyGram’s Chairman and CEO Alex Holmes revealed during a live conversation with Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, that 10% of all cross-border transactions between Mexico and the United States are handled via Ripple’s On-Demand Liquidity (ODL). According to Holmes:

“We’re able to settle billions of dollars in seconds. The magic really comes from pairing MoneyGram transactions with Ripple’s ODL.”

Furthermore, Ripple revealed in a recent announcement that RippleNet – the company’s network of financial institutions that use its services for global payments – has successful on-boarded more than 300 institutions so far. RippleNet is also boasting of transaction volume year-over-year increase in more than ten-fold.

Ripple also said the number of ODL transactions between 2019 Q1 and October, has surged 7 times over. The company has not released a full list of companies on RippleNet, but has said that there are 24 institutions which currently use ODL specifically, while 37 in total, use XRP some way or another.

Apart from SBI and MoneyGram; Interbank, SendFriend, Bitrue, Bittrex, TransferGo, and Bitstamp are some companies that use XRP-based solutions.

A few days ago, Ripple unveiled RippleNet Home, a new platform that will allow members of the RippleNet community to easily interact and partner with each other. The platform will also allow these members to gain access to not just records, but also “data analytics on their own transactions.”

Japan’s SBI Holdings Forms Alliance with Fukushima to Use Ripple’s MoneyTap