Disclaimer. This article has been updated to include comments from Yoshitaka Kitao during the financial results conference call.
Yoshitaka Kitao, CEO and representative director of financial services giant Holdings, has been appointed as an executive of Labs Inc., Cointelegraph on April 26.
As previously reported, SBI Holdings is an active partner of via their joint venture, “SBI Asia,” which was established to promote the use of XRP in Asian financial markets back .
SBI’s official announcement states that Kitao’s appointment to his new executive role at Labs will aim to “further promote and digital asset utilization at financial institutions in and Asia, and strive to develop financial services with high customer benefit.”
During the financial results conference call, Kitao said that a digital asset version of Swift is something that should be aiming for, as by Cointelegraph . He noted that RippleNet should have a goal to consist of 10,000 clients, rather than the current 200.
Cointelegraph also writes that Kitao believes that regulators won’t be able to judge where XRP is a security for the next three to five years.
In October 2018, SBI and a consumer-focused XRP-powered payments app MoneyTap, which uses ’s solution xCurrent to enable domestic bank-to-bank transfers in real time.
MoneyTap aspires to eventually see a consortium of 61 Japanese banks — representative of more than 80% of all of ’s banking assets — in the service, and investments from 13 local banks this March.
As Cointelegraph today notes, Kitao’s appointment ostensibly aligns with a bid to move forward with a closer rapprochement between and enterprise consortium .
As previously , Kitao has publicly advocated for the merits of both and R3, the latter of which counts SBI as a member and reportedly largest outside shareholder.
After erstwhile between R3 and had been in fall 2018, Kitao claimed this February that he had encouraged the two former ostensible rivals to cooperate on a joint venture, and that he was bullish on the potential impact of “Corda Settler” — R3’s universal payment settlement platform, which XRP as its first supported crypto in December.
This January, SBI its nine-month financial report, which identified the implementation of R3 and technologies as a major part of its strategy.
The past couple of years have seen SBI pursue multiple ventures in the crypto sector, including its own exchange — — alongside a series of in businesses crypto and .
Earlier this month, crypto startup FXCoin it had completed a third-party allotment of shares with SBI Holdings, contributing to the startup’s aims of launching a crypto exchange business in the country.
Published at Sat, 27 Apr 2019 06:25:43 +0000
