SBI Holdings CEO Yoshitaka Kitao acknowledged on Monday that the financial giant’s 10-year bet on Ripple Labs has grown into a core driver of the company’s profitability.
In his 2026 New Year’s address, Kitao mentioned the “cryptocurrency ecosystem” as a key element of the group’s current financial health.
“Needless to say, these areas (referring to Ripple investment and the virtual currency ecosystem) currently serve as the SBI Group’s earnings pillars,” Kitao said.
This confirms the financial giant’s financial strategy, which was originally formulated several years ago.
“In my 2018 New Year’s address, I said: ‘We at SBI Group position A&B (i.e. AI and blockchain) as the technology that will bring about the greatest social change in the next decade. In the financial services sector, we must focus our efforts on building a crypto ecosystem.’ And we did just that,” he recalled.
Long-time Ripple ally
SBI Holdings participated in Ripple’s Series B funding round in September 2016. The partnership was strengthened with the establishment of SBI Ripple Asia earlier that year. The joint venture was established to provide Ripple’s blockchain-based payment solutions to financial institutions in Japan and across Asia.
This partnership resulted in the launch of MoneyTap in 2018, the company’s first major consumer product. Powered by Ripple’s distributed ledger technology (DLT), the mobile app allows customers of more than 60 Japanese banks to settle domestic payments almost instantly.
Mr. Kitao will join Ripple’s board of directors. He was appointed as the successor to Takashi Okita (currently CEO of SBI Ripple Asia).
The partnership faced its biggest stress test when the US Securities and Exchange Commission sued Ripple Labs in late 2020, but SBI stood firm. The company issued an official statement confirming that XRP is not a security under Japanese law.
Over the past few years, SBI has started integrating the XRP Ledger (XRPL) into its broader financial services.
