South Korean banking giant Shinhan Financial Group’s affiliate ShinhanCard has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with fintech firm Omise and its Ethereum-based banking platform OmiseGO in order to explore opportunities for fintech and blockchain initiatives.
The MoU establishes a framework for the parties to work towards advancing the Shinhan’s digital offerings across its portfolio of payment services and mobile application. They will leverage Omise’s broad portfolio of payment technology and solutions, and OmiseGO’s server and mobile SDKs that have been made publicly available for the purpose of onboarding e-wallet providers.
“Omise and OmiseGO are working to revolutionize the way digital value moves globally, with an end goal of creating a platform that facilitates a decentralized economy. The OMG platform, using the Plasma architecture, is being built as a public network that is powered by Ethereum.” said Jun Hasegawa CEO & Founder of Omise and OmiseGO. “The first phase of the wallet SDK was recently release and is available for anyone to use. We want to make it easy for those who need online asset exchange as part of their business to connect seamlessly to the OMG Network.”
The potential areas for cooperation include exchange of learnings, expertise, and information in order to support overseas processing of the Shinhan FAN Card and expand its overseas merchant base; exploring possibilities of establishing a payment infrastructure to enable mobile payments for foreigners visiting Korea by developing a Global FAN Card; and exploring potential joint projects, new business models, identify cross-border use cases and key application opportunities based on the OmiseGO technology.
Shinhan Bank has been spearheading blockchain initiatives in the country. In November 2017, Visa announced that the South Korean bank would test Visa B2B Connect – its blockchain-based platform aimed at providing financial institutions a simple, fast and secure way to process business-to-business (B2B) payments globally. Earlier this year, the bank announced it has started the development of an integrated authentication service using blockchain technology.
In February, the bank completed blockchain trials with Ripple Labs which focused on using the Ripple network and its liquidity system xRapid to send cross-border payments, according to CCN.
Founded in June 2013, Omise is a Thailand-based fintech startup. The company raised $25 million in an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) in order to develop a next-generation decentralized payment network, OmiseGO.
