Mitsubishi UFJ Financial to Invest in Bitcoin Venture Coinbase

TOKYO – Japan’s biggest lender, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc., is stepping into the bitcoin world by investing in Coinbase, a service that allows users to store the virtual currency and make payments with it.
To ramp up operations in Asia, Coinbase is set to raise about $10.5 million from investors on Friday including MUFG’s core banking unit and an MUFG venture-capital fund, bank officials said.
The MUFG investment is a relatively bold step for Japan’s megabanks, which tend to be conservative about new technologies. Some of their automated teller machines don’t accept non-Japanese cards because of security worries.
Recently, MUFG and its peers have been looking at financial technology as an area for growth because low interest rates have hurt the profitability of bread-and-butter lending.
Coinbase, which was founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam, has expanded operations to 32 countries currently from 19 in January 2015. The company raised $75 million last year from investors including the New York Stock Exchange and several banks.

This post was published at Wall Street Journal on July 7, 2016.