A consortium of 61 Japanese banks plans to use Ripple's blockchain technology for a consumer payments app, starting with a trial in three banks in autumn 2018
Context & Ripple Effects
Japan's banking sector has been working its way from pilots to shared payment infrastructure: this 61-bank consortium putting a consumer app on Ripple's rails in autumn 2018 sits at the start of that arc, with a three-bank trial acting as the gate before wider rollout. The move parallels what was happening globally the same year, when more than 75 of the world's biggest banks joined the JPMorgan, RBC, and ANZ alliance testing blockchain for faster interbank payments.
What makes the story worth tracking is where Japan's banks took it next: by late 2020, 30+ major Japanese firms were running experiments toward issuing a common, private digital currency to push digitalization in a cash-heavy economy, and by 2021 the top banks and 70 other companies were preparing a deposit-backed digital currency trial for large business transactions. The Ripple app trial is the first step on that path.
First-order effects
- Three trial banks get a live consumer-facing app running on Ripple's technology in autumn 2018, while the remaining 58 consortium members hold back until those results land.
- Ripple gains its most consequential reference deployment to date — a national-scale banking consortium validating its stack for retail payments rather than just cross-border settlement.
Second-order effects
- Competing bank alliances such as the JPMorgan-RBC-ANZ group face pressure to show consumer-facing progress of their own, turning bank-blockchain projects into a race over which consortium's rails become the default.
- If the trial succeeds, the consortium's own infrastructure choices shift: the same 61 banks would control both the app layer and the settlement layer, squeezing out alternative payment vendors at the point of adoption.
Third-order effects
- The pattern across the coverage points from buying third-party blockchain rails toward banks issuing their own instruments — culminating in the deposit-backed digital currency trials of 2021-22 — meaning vendor-supplied apps become stepping stones rather than endpoints.
- For a cash-dominant market like Japan, consortium-owned digital payment infrastructure concentrates pricing and data power in the hands of member banks, a structure regulators would eventually have to address if it scales.
The trend: Bank consortia are moving from piloting vendor-built blockchain payment apps toward issuing their own consortium digital currencies, with each trial deciding how much of the stack stays in-house.