The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) released their guidance on crypto-assets with a major emphasis on virtual asset service providers (VASPs); meaning crypto-asset exchanges. Major world economies agreed to comply by these rules during the 2019 G20 meeting. Moreover, Ripple announced that they will be working with Coinfirm to make XRP compliant with these rules.
The latest to join in complying with the FATF’s guidance is SBI VC (virtual currencies) Trade. SBI VC Trade is the crypto-trading platform to be opened by SBI, a Japanese bank consortium consisting of 61 banks. Their CEO, Yoshitaka Kitao, has been very outspoken about his approval of Ripple and XRP.
In fact, once their platform is live, all 61 banks will supposedly leverage the power of the XRP Ledger for better efficiency. SBI also was one of the top investors in R3’s $107 million series A fundraising round, a company that will has partnered with both SWIFT and Ripple.
The platform was supposed to go live in March 2019, unfortunately, due to regulatory unclarity, the release had to be pushed till July 2019. Nonetheless, as the Japanese Financial Services Agency (FSA) might be amending laws and making regulations tighter around crypto-assets to ensure investor protection, it is unclear whether the launch date will hold to not.