SBI Holdings announced a Capital and Business Alliance with Fukushima Banks, Ltd as a part of its regional revitalization project. The announcement that came out on 11 November aimed to enhance profitability of regional financial institutions by promoting initiatives to support the operation of these institutions through direct investment from the company or its subsidiaries.
The company extended the reach of the project to local economic activities, and assisted local customers with their assets and improve productivity of local companies. The notice provided by the company read:
“Based on this business policy, we entered into a capital and business alliance with Shimane Bank, Ltd. in September this year, and this time we have formed a capital and business alliance with Fukushima Bank. We decided to work on improving the corporate value.”
Under this partnership, Fukushima Bank will join MoneyTap Co. Ltd, along with SBI Neo Financial Services Co. Ltd, and SBI FinTech Incubation Co. Ltd, in order to improve its customer convenience and make it cost-effective.
MoneyTap, a consumer-focused blockchain money transfer app was built by SBI Holdings and Ripple, as a joint effort of the SBI Ripple Asia partnership. MoneyTap already homes Sumishin Net Bank and Suruga Bank, along with 28 other banks on its platform. Fukushima Bank might be the 31st on the list and will be serving its customers with Ripple’s tech and MoneyTap’s remittance service.
The company will be underwriting 5,000,000 common shares at 222 yen per share, which brought the total investment to 1,100 million yen.
“The SBI Regional Bank Value Creation Fund, outsourced by SBI Asset Management Co., Ltd., owns 373,200 shares of Fukushima Bank’s common stock (1.63% voting rights ratio as of March 31, 2019) The total voting rights ratio after the underwriting is scheduled to be 19.25%.”
The payment for the alliance has been scheduled from 30 November 2019 to 31 January 2020.
