Japanese Giant SBI Remit Allows Customers to Send Money To Africa Using Bitcoin’s Blockchain

Bitcoin continues its expansion all over the world. This time, the Japanese money transfer company SBI Remit will allow over half a million customers to send money to Africa using Bitcoin. The main intention behind it is to provide more reliable ways to send money to other countries.

The treasury management services are provided by the company BitPesa, after raising $10 million dollars from Greycroft partners. The company sends a payment in dollars, euros or another currency, exchanges them for Bitcoin and takes them out in Nigerian naira or Ghanaian cedi.

Bitcoin works as a bridge between two different currencies that might not have enough liquidity. At the same time, it reduces costs and transfer times, and it also provides more security.

SBI Remit directo, Nobuo Ando, believes BitPesa’s multiple international license will allow the African country to have stronger commercial ties with Japan. At the same time, BitPesa and SBI Remit will be increasing levels of trust and transparency in the market and on the international stage.

Nobuo Ando explained on the matter:

“Many companies are doing trade with African countries and they are suffering from the high cost and the slow speed and not very precise administration. So this is the market that we would like to go in, together with Bitpesa.”

With this partnership, the companies will be using BitPesa’s custom treasury tools that are related to Bitcoin and its blockchain, providing liquidity for small and medium sized companies and firms. At the moment, BitPesa is targeting cosmetic, electronics and lucrative used car companies.

Additionally, the Japanese yen will now have direct pairs with fiat currencies from African Countries such as Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, tanzania, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Until now, companies and individuals in Africa that wanted to perform transactions with Japanese firms had to move their funds from different accounts to have more liquid intermediary currencies such as the US dollar or the Euro. That created long transaction times and very high fees for banks and for customers.

According to World Bank, this process had fees of over 7%. With the latest partnership, BitPesa is able to reduce costs and provide to its users the same service for over 3% fees.

SBI Remit has been partnering with other companies from all over the world. The company was founded back in 2010 and has more than 450,000 customers. Most of the people using the platform are foreigners that send money outside Japan. The SBI Holdings subsidiary has already managed to send around 500 billion yen until September 2018.

SBI Holdings has also partnered with Ripple Asia in order to reduce costs and transaction times. These two companies are now exploring other non-blockchain solutions and how to include the XRP cryptocurrency.

The company has also launched a special fund with 50 billion yen to invest in different startups in the coming years. Other investments made by the SBI Group include Veem, bitFlyer, Templum, R3 and coolBitX.

BitPesa is currently working in eight different African countries and has a license from the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and also from the European Union (EU). The main intention is to create unusual currency pairs and provide greater liquidity to the market.

In the future, the company wants to expand to other African countries. BitPesa is currently waiting for the approval of four license applications. Additionally, Rossiello is also working with Japanese authorities and the Japan External Trade Organization known as JETRO. In this way, the African and Japanese market will be connected like never before.

She explained that BitPesa’s core business is to provide greater liquidity to not so common trading pairs rather than focusing in one or two and make a lot of money trading them.

271 +