By Lucas Williams
Ripple has entered into a partnership with a large Japanese money transfer provider, SBI Remit, and Coins. ph, the Philippine crypto exchange for launching its first On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) service in Japan. On Wednesday, Ripple announced that it was launching Ripplenet’s first live ODL service. A shareholder and investor of Ripple, SBI Holdings also made an independent announcement on the same day that crypto exchange SBI VC Trade and SBI Remit have introduced the first international remittance service in Japan that uses crypto assets in collaboration with Ripple Labs. A subsidiary of SBI Fintech solutions, SBI Remit is one of Japan’s largest money transfer companies.
Since 2017, it has been using Ripplenet. A trademark of Betur Inc., Coins.ph is a crypto exchange in the Philippines as well as a leading mobile wallet service, which is regulated by the central bank in the country, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP). According to the announcement, this partnership will bring SBI Remit together with crypto asset exchange platform SBI VC Trade and Coins.ph on Ripplenet for more affordable and faster cross-border payments between Japan and the Philippines. SBI elaborated that users will initiate a remittance request with SBI Remit and XRP will be sent to Coins.ph by SBI VC Trade to Coins.ph in real-time.
The exchange will convert the crypto to the Philippine peso before paying to the remittance recipient. After the news, there was a more than a 16% increase in the price of XRP on Wednesday. Ripple disclosed that the Filipano diaspora is the third-largest that can be found in Japan. Overseas Filipino workers sent a total of $1.8 billion in remittance from Japan to the Philippines during 2020. Furthermore, Japan is also known for having the highest fee for cross-border payments in the world. The company said that the purpose of introducing this On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) service in Japan was to increase the adoption of crypto-enabled services within the region.
The two companies will not require pre-funding because they will leverage the digital asset XRP, which will free up capital and help them boost the expansion of their respective payments businesses. SBI Remit’s Representative Director, Nobuo Ando said that the launch of the ODL service in Japan is just the beginning and they are looking forward to taking it into the next phase of financial innovation. This means it will go beyond real-time payments in the Philippines and spread to other regions as well.
Meanwhile, the lawsuit brought against Ripple Labs, as well as its executives, by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is still ongoing. Brad Garlinghouse, the chief executive of Ripple, has disclosed that once the SEC lawsuit is over, the company plans to go public. However, the outcome of the lawsuit will undoubtedly have an impact on the company as a whole, depending on how it goes. Already, it has affected XRP’s price in the market and there is also a lot of uncertainty surrounding it, which may turn away some investors.