Japan’s Financial Powerhouse Backs XRP Becoming ‘The Amazon Of The Financial World’

• SBI Group’s president and CEO expressed support for Ripple’s goal of turning XRP into the “Amazon of the Financial World.”
• The Japanese conglomerate noted that its adoption of XRP and investments in Ripple have underpinned its profitability.

Japan has shown a particular bias toward XRP over the years. Back when the asset was treading the US markets with caution, thanks to Ripple’s multi-year case at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) questioning its classification, key institutions across the Asian financial powerhouse had already set their sights on it.

SBI Group’s Big Bets on XRP

The SBI Group, an internet-based financial conglomerate, has been at the forefront of XRP’s adoption in Japan. As early as 2023, it has gradually leveraged the token’s cross-border capabilities in Southeast Asia through its subsidiary, SBI Remit, while exploring applications of its underlying technology, the XRP Ledger (XRPL), for additional use cases.

Internally, SBI has also been running XRP validator nodes. Meanwhile, the company’s president and CEO, Yoshitaka Kitao, has been a long-term investor in the asset.

ADVERTISEMENT## SBI Backing XRP’s Advance

Fast-forward to 2026, Kitao has catalyzed renewed market optimism with his confirmation that SBI continues to back XRP and Ripple’s advance in “creating an ecosystem for cryptocurrencies.” This complements Ripple’s long-term vision of making an XRPL-powered one-stop shop or unified infrastructure for both traditional finance and decentralized finance (DeFi) activities.

XRP’s goal of becoming the hub of future finance is steadily gaining momentum, driven by Ripple’s explosive investments and acquisitions, including the deals on GTreasury, Rail, Palisade, and Hidden Road. Now, the company has resumed its march, indicating that it’s exploring a massive project with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The move would integrate Amazon Bedrock AI into Ripple’s operational stack. This would help eliminate persistent bottlenecks in the XRPL system logs, enhancing its performance, reinforcing its integrity, and resulting in greater security, scalability, speed, and overall efficiency for the network. On the other hand, the crypto community expects the collaboration to pave the way for more partnerships between Ripple and e-commerce giant Amazon in the future.

ADVERTISEMENTFurthermore, XRP’s native chain is making big leaps in the realm of real-world asset (RWA) tokenization. In addition to launching the Ripple USD (RLUSD) stablecoin, it recently supported BNY Mellon’s tokenized deposit services for institutional clients by serving as custodian for the asset, and with Ripple Prime (an offshoot of its Hidden Road acquisition) becoming its early adopter.

Investment in XRP and Ripple Paying Off

SBI’s huge bets, including a $200 million injection into Evernorth’s XRP-focused digital asset treasury (DAT) strategy and a 9% stake in Ripple, have considerably paid off. Kitao highlighted in his annual address that SBI’s adoption of the asset and partnerships with Ripple have significantly contributed to its profitability.

The SBI Group has yet to provide full details on the latest earnings from its investments in XRP and Ripple. Nonetheless, SBI Ripple Asia, SBI’s joint venture with Ripple, reflected a 60% growth market in the company’s 2025 Integrated Report.

The conglomerate reported an increase to ¥10.5 trillion (approximately $66 billion) in assets under management (AUM) last year, with an estimated rise to ¥20 trillion in AUM by the end of 2027.

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