Nairobi, Kenya — September 20th 2018 — AZA, a currency trading solution, today announced their partnership with SBI Remit, Japan’s largest remittance service provider, a subsidiary of SBI Group, a Japanese internet financial services pioneer.  As Japan has recently made a big push into Africa, the firms have joined forces to leverage blockchain technology to remove friction, improve efficiency, and support digital interoperability for cross-border payments.  From a macroeconomic perspective, this will help businesses scale faster between Japan and Africa.

“Our vision is to accelerate the growth of businesses in frontier markets,” said Elizabeth Rossiello, founder and CEO of AZA. “While there is a growing interest in Africa, there is still a lot of hesitation due to market conditions and lack of hybrid financial infrastructure to support agile growth of businesses. Through our partnership with SBI Remit, we have created a secure, fast, and easy-to-use forex solution for Japanese companies to buy and sell eight frontier market currencies with G20 currencies (including Japanese Yen). Businesses can do this instantly from and to all major African bank and mobile money accounts.”  

Source: How We Made It In Africa

While there are a number of quickly growing industries in this corridor, SBI Remit and AZA will be tightly focused on a couple of specific verticals for this partnership, including Japanese cars, cosmetics, and electronics. For example, Japanese car dealers will now be able to improve the efficiency of their payment operations and reduce the FX risk between African consumers and Japanese exporters.  They will also be able to more easily expand into new markets with the BitPesa merchant collection solution.

Founded in 1999, SBI Remit is a subsidiary of SBI Group which has helped pioneer financial services, especially on the internet, in Japan.  Historically, SBI Remit has pushed the envelope working with a number of successful blockchain projects globally, but this is the first time they have partnered with an African company.

“We are very excited about this partnership with AZA. Africa has become a strategic interest for SBI Group recently and we have been looking for innovative solutions to partner with and serve our customers better,” said Nobuo Ando, Representative Director of SBI Remit. “With the accelerating interest of collaboration between Japan and African countries, we will be able to leverage AZA’s expertise in the market and technological prowess in offering efficient FX solutions.”

With this partnership, Japanese and Africans companies will now be able to scale more effectively with a powerful cross-border treasury solution.