SBI Africa, a wholly- subsidiary of Japan-based SBI Holdings, stated on Monday (May 9) that its cross-border e-commerce site “SBI Motor Japan” is now taking Bitcoin and XRP payments.

According to SBI Africa,  “the SBI Group has numerous group companies in Japan and overseas, mainly in the financial services business including SBI Securities and SBI Sumishin Net Bank, the leading online financial services companies, asset management business, and the biotechnology, healthcare and medical informatics business.” 

SBI Africa, which is a “member of JUMVEA (Japan Used Vehicle Exporters Association) and JapaneseCarTrade,” says on its website that it offers “fairly cost, high quality used cars to Africa” to help its parent firm “extend its financial services to the region.”

According to a press statement issued on May 9, SBI Africa’s “SBI Motor Japan” website is “the first cross-border e-commerce site in Japan to accept XRP,” based on research.

It went on to clarify why accepting cryptocurrency payments is vital when selling to emerging market countries:

“According to a 2017 World Bank report, 1.7 billion adults globally lack bank accounts, with the majority concentrated in emerging economies such as the African continent.” Furthermore, according to a survey conducted by the Singapore-based exchange CooCoin, the number of transactions and users of virtual currencies, including bitcoin, in Africa increased 15-fold to 25-fold in the year through January 2022.

“Crypto asset remittances use the blockchain (distributed ledger), thus even if the banking system fails, as long as the Internet is up and running, remittances can be used without being affected by the failure of an exchange, etc.” This is also highly regarded and is spreading as an alternative to traditional remittance methods.  We intend to expand the number of currencies that can be utilised for settlement in the future to meet the growing demand for remittances using crypto assets.”

According to the press release, “for the settlement of crypto assets,” SBI Africa uses SBI VCTrade, a crypto exchange operated by the SBI Group.

“Crypto Eri” (“@sentosumosaba” on Twitter), a highly popular and respected crypto analyst and influencer who is one of the most valuable members of the XRP community due to her extensive excellent reporting and analysis of all Ripple and XRP related news, has much more details on this new use case for XRP as well as other ways that SBI uses XRP: