Shinhan Card and SBI to test yen stablecoin payments in Korea

Shinhan Card and two SBI Group units signed an agreement on October 20 to test yen stablecoin payments for travelers between South Korea and Japan. The deal covers card spending, wallet transfers and trade settlement.

Announced on October 21, the memorandum was signed a day earlier at SBI's headquarters in Tokyo. Shinhan Card is one of South Korea's largest card issuers. Its Japanese partners are SBI VC Trade and SBI XDC Network APAC, both part of SBI Group, a financial firm that runs banks, brokerages and a crypto exchange.

What the three companies plan to test

The work starts as a proof of concept. The first test links a yen stablecoin to a payment card, so a Japanese visitor in Seoul could pay at a shop the same way they would with any card. A second test moves the stablecoin from one wallet to another. A third uses SBI XDC Network APAC's blockchain to settle money across the border, which the companies say could run faster than existing remittance networks.

Alongside those tests, the partners will check anti-money-laundering and fraud controls, and weigh joining the XDC network as node operators. Park Chang-hoon, the president of Shinhan Card, attended the Tokyo signing. So did Kondo Tomohiko, the representative director of SBI VC Trade. Neither company put an on-record quote from them in its announcement.

Why the Korea-Japan travel corridor

Tourist money is the reason. More than 10 million people traveled between the two countries in the first eight months of 2026, according to Japan's national tourism organization. South Korea was Japan's biggest source of foreign visitors in that stretch, at 7.42 million arrivals. Japan was the second-largest source of visitors to South Korea, at 2.7 million.

Cross-border card payments carry currency-conversion costs and can take days to clear between banks. A stablecoin pegged to the yen, moved on a blockchain, is what the two sides want to test against that. Visa already runs stablecoin prefunding for cross-border payouts, so the idea itself is not new. Whether it ends up cheaper or quicker for an ordinary shopper is what this trial is meant to find out.

What the deal does not settle

A memorandum is an intent to work together, not a launch. The companies set no date for a live service. They did not name the yen stablecoin the tests will use. A commercial rollout, both sides said, depends on meeting the rules in Japan and South Korea first.

History matters here. Shinhan Card ran a similar proof of concept in April covering stablecoin payments and cross-border settlement, and no consumer product followed. SBI VC Trade registered in March 2025 as Japan's first electronic payment instruments exchange service provider, a status that lets it handle regulated stablecoins. South Korea is still drafting the law that would govern a stablecoin used at checkout.

What to watch

The near-term signal is whether this proof of concept turns into something a traveler can actually use, and on what timeline. Watch for the yen stablecoin to be named, and for South Korea's stablecoin bill to firm up, because a live card product needs both. The tie-up also fits a wider push at Shinhan Financial Group, which signed a digital-asset and payments deal with Visa in August under chairman Jin Ok-dong. More card networks are running the same experiment, from Mastercard's fiat-and-stablecoin platform on down. Few have shipped.