Japanese conglomerate SBI Holdings, which also owns SBI Ripple Asia, is considering offering its shareholders dividends paid in popular cryptocurrency XRP.
As detailed in the recent SBI Holdings Information Meeting, the firm is planning to use Ripple’s On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) technology more heavily in the coming months, and is trialling a number of initiatives alongside Ripple.
Among these initiatives are plans to reward SBI Holdings shareholders in XRP tokens, which the group plans to make available to all shareholders by March 2020.
MorningStar, the financial research group based in Chicago, provided its Japanese shareholders with XRP dividends earlier this year.
Investors who held more than one trading unit of MorningStar stock as of September 30 2019 were ‘gifted’ 30 XRP as part of a crypto dividend trial, and now it seems Japanese financial giant SBI Holdings is following suit.
According to information supplied in SBI Holdings’ latest meeting, the number of applicants to the SBI VC Trade service, where users can trade XRP, increased dramatically following MorningStar’s announcement in September.
SBI working closely with Ripple
The latest SBI meeting also compared Ripple’s international remittance service with its closest traditional competitor, SWIFT. The group claimed that Ripple could settle transactions in seconds or minutes, whereas SWIFT may take up to six hours to settle 75% of the funds.
The presentation indicated that SBI Holdings was exploring the use of RippleNet technology across several currency corridors in South East Asia following the successful launch of a Ripple-based remittance service between Japan and Vietnam.
Once these remittance corridors are live, SBI Ripple Asia will cover almost 50% of the entire Ripple network.
The new remittance networks will use Ripple’s ODL technology, which uses XRP to create immediate liquidity for fiat currencies, allowing rapid processing of money transfers.
SBI Holdings is investing heavily in blockchain infrastructure. Last month, the group announced a seven-figure investment in the digital securities issuer Securitize.
Securitize creates regulatory-compliant security tokens, allowing companies to issue equity on the blockchain. At the time, SBI Holdings CEO Yoshitaka Kitao said that the SBI group strongly believes in the future of digital assets.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author should not be considered as financial advice. We do not give advice on financial products.