The Nikkei has reported that SBI Shinsei Bank plans to offer vouchers redeemable for cryptocurrencies via sister cryptocurrency exchange SBI VC Trade. The three month pilot for the promotional campaign will start on 10 June and target depositors who will receive additional vouchers equivalent to 20% of the interest earned on their term deposit accounts. Banking clients have to open an account at SBI VC Trade and can redeem the vouchers for BTC, ETH or XRP.
SBI is an investor in Ripple and they have a Japanese joint venture, SBI Ripple Asia. In March SBI Holdings issued a digital bond targeting consumers which offered XRP tokens as a bonus, also requiring an SBI VC Trade account. It has also regularly offered XRP as dividends. Given that the bank has not publicly announced the full details, and SBI’s history of using XRP as part of promotions, there is a reasonable chance that a high proportion of the crypto offered might be in XRP.
The banking promotion will be available across around 4.33 million eligible deposit accounts. In May, a subsidiary of SBI Shinsei Bank, Aplus, started issuing Visa cards that accumulate cryptocurrency rewards.
Among traditional finance firms, SBI has been an early supporter of blockchain and cryptocurrency, and has conducted cryptocurrency mining via SBI Crypto since 2017. It also owns one of the largest institutional market makers, B2C2, which it acquired in 2020. Beyond crypto it has extensive tokenization activities.
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