SC Ventures, Standard Chartered’s innovation, fintech investment, and ventures arm, announced that it had entered into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with SBI Holdings, Inc. SC Ventures aims to expand its portfolio at a business and geographic level and to explore new ecosystems through this partnership.

SC Ventures is a business unit that provides a platform & catalyst for Standard Chartered to promote innovation, invest in disruptive financial technology and explore alternative business models.

SBI is a major Japanese financial conglomerate and has verticals in asset management, financial services, and biotechnology-related businesses. Its venture capital fund has a diverse investment portfolio covering internet technology, fintech, artificial intelligence, and big data, blockchain, and crypto-assets.

SC Ventures and SBI firmly believe in transforming financial services through building and investing in “ecosystems” of new companies to serve their customers in the ways they want to be served. Both organizations also have a common goal to fulfill society’s expectations of financial services through leveraging innovative technology as it relates to enabling growth, welfare improvement, sustainability, and financial inclusion in the markets where they operate.

The MOU offers an opportunity for SBI and SC Ventures to mutually benefit from the collective breadth of investment expertise and complementary global footprints. SBI is headquartered in Japan and has a strong presence in Southeast Asian markets. SC Ventures has significant experience operating across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

The MOU is structured to cover three main areas: (1) Opportunities to drive collaboration as well as co-invest in portfolio companies, including the option to establish joint venture funds; (2) Cooperation for business development to set up or scale business models leveraging each other’s geographic footprint; and, (3) Creating ecosystems around particular themes to drive scale and impact (for example SMEs, supply chains, digital assets, decentralized finance, and Web 3.0).

Malaysia’s VentureTECH and Japan’s SBI Ventures launch $18M private equity fund to boost Malaysian growth-stage technology firms