Shinhan Card and SBI test yen stablecoin payments for Japan-Korea travel

South Korea's Shinhan Card announced Wednesday that it signed an agreement with Japan's SBI VC Trade and SBI XDC Network APAC to test yen-backed stablecoin payments for travelers and cross-border trade settlement, Cointelegraph reported.

Under the pact signed Tuesday, the companies will test stablecoin card payments, wallet-to-wallet payments, and cross-border trade settlement. They will also assess anti-money-laundering and fraud-detection controls, CoinDesk reported.

What the collaboration covers

The collaboration will explore card-linked merchant payments for Japanese visitors in South Korea and peer-to-peer wallet transfers among broader cross-border trade remittances. The process remains at an early stage. The firms have not named the stablecoin they plan to test or set a timeline for trials, let alone a commercial launch.

Shinhan Card is one of South Korea's biggest credit card companies, serving around 20 million cardholders. SBI is a Japanese financial heavyweight that runs banks, brokerages, insurers, and crypto exchanges. SBI VC Trade registered in March 2025 as Japan's first electronic payment instruments exchange service provider, enabling it to handle USDC.

Travel between the two countries generated more than 10 million visitor arrivals in the first eight months of 2026, according to official tourism figures from both countries. South Korea was Japan's largest source of foreign visitors with 7.42 million arrivals. Japan was its neighbor's second-largest source with 2.7 million arrivals, Cointelegraph noted.

Existing yen stablecoin context

SBI already distributes JPYSC, a yen-backed stablecoin issued by SBI Shinsei Trust Bank and introduced with Startale Group in June. The token had about 20.1 billion yen, or roughly $127 million, in circulation as of Sept. 7, according to SBI VC Trade.

JPYSC is limited to SBI VC Trade accounts and cannot yet be moved to external wallets. Its circulation on public blockchains also depends on legal and tax clarity and regulatory approval. The companies have not said whether JPYSC will form part of the test program.

Shinhan Card completed a proof-of-concept in April covering stablecoin payments and cross-border settlement. The company said it would link the new project to Shinhan Financial's broader digital-asset push, which includes an August agreement with Visa to explore stablecoin issuance, transfers, and card settlement.

Regulatory backdrop in both countries

Japan has moved earlier than most large economies to regulate stablecoin issuance and distribution. The Payment Services Act framework that took effect in 2023 requires stablecoin issuers to be banks, funds-transfer agents, or registered trust companies, and it restricts foreign-issued stablecoin distribution to licensed entities. SBI VC Trade's registration as an electronic payment instruments exchange service provider falls under that framework.

South Korea's approach has been slower on domestic won-backed stablecoins but more open to foreign-currency pilots tied to travel and trade. Shinhan Financial's work with Visa and the new SBI pact fit a pattern of Korean card issuers testing stablecoin rails without waiting for a full domestic regulatory regime for won tokens.

Neither company disclosed which blockchain networks would be used in the tests, whether settlement would happen on public chains or permissioned ledgers, or how card schemes would route yen-stablecoin balances through existing merchant acceptance networks. The announcement also did not say whether the pilot would involve a specific merchant category in South Korea or run as a closed-loop test among the partners' own entities.

SBI XDC Network APAC, the third signatory, works on trade finance infrastructure using the XDC Network. Its role in the pact suggests the trade-settlement leg may be separated from the consumer travel-payment experiments, though the companies have not described the technical architecture.

Shinhan Card announced the agreement in a statement on its corporate news channel. SBI Holdings confirmed the pact through its own release. Neither statement named a target launch market beyond the general Japan-South Korea travel corridor, and neither disclosed financial terms, revenue sharing, or whether other card networks would be invited into later phases of the work.