SBI Holdings CEO Yoshitaka Kitao, in his 2026 New Year's address, confirmed that the financial giant's decade-long strategic investment in Ripple Labs has matured into a central driver of the company's profitability. He explicitly stated that the "cryptocurrency ecosystem," with Ripple at its core, now serves as a pillar of the SBI Group's earnings.
The partnership dates back to September 2016, when SBI Holdings participated in Ripple's Series B funding round. That same year, the two entities solidified their alliance by establishing the joint venture SBI Ripple Asia, aimed at deploying Ripple's blockchain-based payment solutions to financial institutions across Japan and Asia.
A major milestone was reached in 2018 with the launch of MoneyTap, a consumer-facing mobile payment app powered by Ripple's distributed ledger technology (DLT). The service enabled near-instant domestic payments for customers of over 60 Japanese banks, marking Ripple's first major consumer product in the region.
The partnership endured significant stress during the U.S. SEC's lawsuit against Ripple Labs in late 2020. SBI Holdings publicly affirmed its support, declaring that XRP was not considered a security under Japanese law. During this period, Kitao himself joined Ripple's Board of Directors, further cementing the strategic relationship.
Kitao reflected on his 2018 address, where he positioned AI and Blockchain as the technologies that would bring the greatest social change over the next decade and called for full efforts to build a cryptocurrency ecosystem. In 2026, he declared, "And we have done exactly that." In recent years, SBI has further integrated the XRP Ledger (XRPL) into its broader financial services infrastructure.
