Japanese Fintech Startup Money Forward to Launch Crypto Exchange

One of Japan’s most innovative personal financial management startups Money Forward Inc. announced it will set up its own cryptocurrency exchange by the end of 2018.

New Exchange Will Begin with a Media Platform

Money Foward CEO and founder Yosuke Tsuji made the statement on the company’s website that a newly created subsidiary called Money Forward Financial Co. Ltd would be the flagship for the new project.

The firm’s plan of action begins by establishing a crypto media platform to ‘dispatch news related to virtual currency and price comparison of domestic and overseas exchange centers’. Led by President Junichi Kanda, the media platform will be the stepping stone on which the company will eventually launch its exchange.

The statement refers to the goal of prioritizing a secure and easy to navigate interface on the exchange whether it be on the web or as a mobile app it will ‘display transaction history and asset status in an easy-to-understand manner’.

Concurrent with its mother company’s start in personal finance management, Money Forward Financial plans to expand upon the type of services offered by cryptocurrency exchanges to include a crypto account book that can file data spread across 20 different local and foreign-based cryptocurrency exchanges as well as a tool to allow users to generate profit and loss data for tax filings. These services would be an extension of a digital asset remittance system based on legal currencies and electronic money.

Money Forward has Sound Base in Japan

Money Forward began as a tiny startup in an apartment in Takadanobaba, a neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward, by Yosuke Tsuji five years ago. It quickly grew to employ 230 staffers of which about 40% are engineers. The companies IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Mothers market raised roughly $27 million in revenue. Since then Tsuji has been approached with offers of all type and his company is now valued at about $500 million. He said in 2017 about the success of his IPO;

“It’s not just about raising funds. I think the IPO has given our credibility a boost,”

With Money Forward already a huge success in Japan with 5.5 million registered users the expectation is that Money Forward Financial will reap the benefits of that support and be able to roll many of those customers into its newly offered services. Both companies have overseas markets in their sights and Tsuji has addressed the issue of expansion saying;

“Money issues, including payment methods, are different depending on the country, so it’s not a matter of simply translating our service into English, we need to think of how we can adapt to each country.”

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