Behind SBI’s bid to build a digital asset empire in SEA

While many investors have been pulling back from Southeast Asia’s tech sector, Japan’s SBI Holdings has been on a shopping spree across the region.

Over the past three years, the Japanese financial giant has acquired stakes in a string of Southeast Asian companies, including a US$270 million investment in Indonesia-based trading platform Ajaib in August.

But SBI isn’t simply betting on a recovery in the region’s fintech market. It appears to be assembling the pieces of a new financial ecosystem built around stablecoins and tokenized assets.

In his announcement of the Ajaib investment, SBI chairman and CEO Yoshitaka Kitao called the trading platform a “perfect match” for the group’s vision of building a global structure for digital assets.

So far, SBI’s acquisitions in Southeast Asia reveal a pattern, according to analysts who spoke with Tech in Asia. The firm tends to target companies that already hold regulatory licenses in their respective markets and have an established customer base.

“The real magic is when you are able to create that cross-border ecosystem,” says Qin En Looi, partner at Saison Capital. “The idea is that they don’t have to build it from scratch.”

But SBI still needs to turn these individual platforms into a cross-border network for digital assets linking Southeast Asia and Japan. That will be no small task, particularly when stablecoins and tokenized assets have yet to achieve widespread adoption in many Southeast Asian markets.

Tech in Asia reached out to SBI Holdings for comment but did not receive a response as of publication time.

Building the distribution network

In recent years, several governments across Asia – including Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong – have established regulatory frameworks for digital assets. As a result, financial institutions are stepping up their involvement in the sector, particularly in stablecoins and tokenized assets.

Earlier this year, SBI introduced JPYSC, Japan’s first trust bank-backed yen stablecoin. Unlike rival JPYC, which limits purchases and cash-outs to 1 million yen (around US$6,300), JPYSC is designed to handle larger institutional transactions.

For now, SBI’s stablecoin is available only to users with accounts at SBI VC Trade, its Japan-based crypto exchange. But with the company building a crypto network across Southeast Asia, JPYSC could eventually be offered through other exchanges in which SBI has invested.

Coinhako could be one of them.

In a previous interview with Tech in Asia, Coinhako co-founder Yusho Liu acknowledged that SBI’s acquisition of the Singapore-based exchange could provide the Japanese group with a way to distribute its digital assets.

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