Shinhan Card and SBI Units Explore Yen Stablecoin Payments for Japanese Visitors in South Korea

Shinhan Card and SBI's Yen Stablecoin Pact

South Korean card issuer Shinhan Card and two subsidiaries of Japan's SBI Holdings are preparing to explore yen-backed stablecoin payments between the two countries, per the announcement from SBI Holdings. The group's counterparts are SBI VC Trade, its licensed crypto exchange, and SBI XDC Network APAC, a company that builds trade finance blockchain infrastructure. Three use cases are on the table: card-linked merchant payments that would let Japanese visitors settle purchases at South Korean stores with a yen stablecoin tied to their card, direct transfers from one crypto wallet to another, and the settlement of cross-border trade invoices in stablecoins.

The work includes a compliance track as well: systems intended to flag suspicious transactions and procedures for meeting anti-money laundering obligations. The initiative sits in the emerging PayFi sector, where stablecoins are applied to payment and settlement flows rather than trading, and it targets one of Asia's busiest bilateral travel and trade corridors.

SBI brings an existing domestic asset to the project. It already distributes JPYSC, a yen-backed token issued by SBI Shinsei Trust Bank and introduced together with Startale Group in June. That token had about 20.1 billion yen, roughly $127 million, in circulation as of September 7, according to SBI VC Trade. JPYSC is confined to accounts on that exchange and cannot yet be moved to external wallets, a limitation familiar to anyone who has weighed the Crypto Exchange vs Crypto Wallet trade-off, and its circulation on public blockchains depends on legal and tax clarity plus regulatory approval. The companies have not said whether JPYSC itself will form part of the test program, which stablecoin they intend to use, or when trials would begin.

Shinhan Card, a unit of Shinhan Financial that serves about 20 million cardholders, is attaching the project to its parent's wider digital-asset program, which includes an agreement signed with Visa in August to explore stablecoin issuance, transfers and card settlement.

JPYC Plans Bank-Account Wallet Charging Demo

A second, domestically focused project is working on the same funding problem from the retail side. Yen stablecoin issuer JPYC, SBJ Bank and LINE NEXT, the Web3 unit of messaging app LINE, plan a demonstration of a charge function that connects a bank account directly to a stablecoin wallet. In the flow under study, a user tops up JPYC straight from bank deposits in one step, instead of buying tokens through spot trading on an exchange and then transferring them to a hot wallet by hand. The stablecoin would arrive at the user's wallet address immediately after the bank debit, collapsing what is currently a multi-step process.

The design matters because funding is where most stablecoin friction sits. A bank-linked charge function makes deposits the on-ramp and keeps the money inside the banking system until the moment of conversion, the same model card networks and fintech firms have long used to move fiat into digital payment instruments.

Japan's regulatory framework for stablecoins, built around the revised Payment Services Act, permits this kind of fiat-backed issuance by licensed entities, and both JPYC and SBI's JPYSC operate inside it. What the demonstration has not defined is just as important: no schedule has been given for the tests, the participating wallet platforms have not been named, and neither company has said whether the function will eventually reach LINE's broad Japanese user base or stay limited to a controlled pilot. The domestic angle is also deliberate: a corridor payment system like the Shinhan-SBI project needs Japanese users to hold yen stablecoins first, and wallet charging from bank accounts is the mechanism that would create those ready balances.

Read together, the two announcements show Japan's yen stablecoin market testing two separate paths at once: a cross-border corridor led by SBI and Shinhan, and a domestic bank-account charging flow led by JPYC. The companies' own disclosures keep the claims narrow. SBI's materials describe the Shinhan project as an early-stage study with no token named, no trial timeline and no commercial launch date, while JPYSC's confinement to exchange accounts shows that the transfer infrastructure these payments would need is still unfinished. The open question is interoperability: corridor payments and retail wallet charging reinforce each other only if the same yen tokens can move between them, and nothing published so far establishes that link.