Japanese SBI Holdings invests 20 million USD in OpenLegacy for blockchain payments

Japanese SBI Holdings, the leading Japanese financial services company, has made a $20 million strategic investment in OpenLegacy, the market leader in microservice-based APIs for legacy and core systems.

SBI has made the investment based on OpenLegacy's long-term technology promise as well as to accelerate its own digital transformation activities, using OpenLegacy's technology to spearhead two key strategic efforts: building Internet banking across SBI's growing portfolio of Japanese banks, and instituting Moneytap, a blockchain-based payment application in Japan and globally. "OpenLegacy will enable our portfolio companies to quickly launch digital innovations, integrating, leveraging, and extending our legacy systems in a fraction of the time, all without changing the underlying systems," said Yoshitaka Kitao, SBI Holdings President & CEO.

OpenLegacy's platform is already being leveraged by Fortune 500 companies like Citi, Liberty Mutual, FIS, and BNP Paribas-Cardif, to name a few. The solution reduces the time, cost and risk normally associated with digital transformation by connecting directly to legacy systems, automatically generating microservice-based APIs, and deploying on-premises or in the cloud. OpenLegacy reduces total cost of ownership by bypassing layers of middleware, and delivers digital services without changing the back-end legacy system.

OpenLegacy further enables seamless integration into existing or new DevOps pipelines because of its compatibility with modern code development practices. Furthermore, by working with the development team to generate custom-built templates, site-specific standards can create consistently robust services at an unprecedented speed.

"SBI's use cases demonstrate the range of achievements that OpenLegacy's technology makes possible," said Ron Rabinowitz, OpenLegacy's President. "The investment opens the door to Japan, the world's second largest mainframe market. It is an important milestone in our global expansion; we're now serving the world's top clients across the United States, Europe, LATAM and Asia."

Japan's SBI group has been involved in blockchain and crypto for sometime, they recently developed a digital wallet for a government licensed crypto asset exchange.