The extension, announced this week, saw SBI Group participate through two vehicles: SBI Ventures Asset Pte Ltd and the SBI-NTU-Kyobo Digital Innovation Fund. Genedant Capital and existing backer Kwee Liong Tek, a prominent Singaporean business leader, also joined the extension. Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India led the original tranche earlier this year.

dtcpay, founded in 2019 by CEO Alice Liu and Group Chairman Band Zhao, operates payment rails that let businesses and consumers accept, hold, and send stablecoins (digital tokens pegged to fiat currencies such as the US dollar). Its core infrastructure includes a real-time swap engine that settles across stablecoin and fiat pairs. The company holds a Major Payment Institution licence from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), an Electronic Money Institution licence in Luxembourg, and additional registrations in Hong Kong, Australia, the United States, and Canada. That regulatory footprint is uncommon at this stage of a company's growth.

"We raised it to fundamentally change how money moves across borders," Liu said in a statement. "We have the capital, the network, and the momentum." Band Zhao framed the round in similarly expansive terms: "The next chapter for dtcpay is about scale... accelerating our mission to build financial infrastructure enabling businesses and consumers to move value globally."

The fresh capital will fund four areas: expanding the merchant network, scaling the existing product suite, launching a revamped enterprise portal for business clients, and rolling out new features inside the consumer dtcpay app. The company already has a partnership with Visa to issue Visa Infinite consumer cards and corporate card solutions that let holders spend stablecoins or fiat at more than 150 million merchant locations worldwide. It also supports over 700 wallet connections through the WalletConnect protocol, a standard that lets users link self-custody crypto wallets to third-party applications.

SBI's Broader Play

SBI Group's entry into dtcpay fits a pattern of aggressive digital asset expansion the Japanese financial conglomerate has executed throughout 2026. The group acquired a majority stake in Singapore crypto exchange Coinhako, agreed to buy Tokyo exchange Bitbank for roughly $289 million (a deal expected to close in October), and invested $125 million in DeFi risk firm Gauntlet. It also launched JPYSC, described as Japan's first trust bank-backed yen stablecoin, and pivoted SBI Solana Global (formerly SBI R3 Japan) to the Solana network for tokenization and stablecoin issuance work. One analyst, writing in CoinDesk, described SBI as "the first financial group in Asia to go after the entire digital asset value chain at once, from issuance and settlement through trading infrastructure, asset management and retail distribution."

Eiichiro So, CEO of SBI Ven Capital, described dtcpay as having "made decisive progress establishing itself as the region's leading regulated payment infrastructure." Quek How Jiang, CEO of Genedant Capital, struck a similar note, saying dtcpay is "building the regulated infrastructure that will bring stablecoin payments into everyday commerce." Genping Liu of Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India, which led the original tranche, pointed to "a massive opportunity in the 'real-world use' of stablecoins, where utility meets regulated finance."

Regional Stakes

The investment carries direct implications for Asia's cross-border payment corridors. The SBI-NTU-Kyobo fund, co-created in 2022 by SBI, South Korean insurer Kyobo Life, and Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, targets early-stage digital technology companies in Southeast Asia and South Asia, with a $75 million target corpus. Its participation signals that SBI views dtcpay as relevant to those corridors, not just Singapore's domestic market.

The macro numbers support that framing. Asia accounts for roughly 60 percent of global stablecoin payment volume, estimated at around $245 billion. The Singapore-to-Indonesia corridor, which is 89 percent B2B in composition, processes approximately $45 billion a year in cross-border flows, with stablecoin settlement offering cost savings that Indonesian manufacturers have put as high as 73 percent compared to traditional letters of credit.

India, the world's largest remittance recipient, receives more than $120 billion in annual remittances, and high-friction corridors from the Gulf, Japan, and Singapore represent a clear demand case for cheaper settlement rails. dtcpay does not currently hold a licence in India or Pakistan, so near-term growth in those corridors would rely on local off-ramp partners rather than direct market entry.

Stablecoin payments remain a small fraction of global digital remittance volume, estimated at 3 to 4 percent, but growth is accelerating. Global B2B stablecoin payments reached roughly $226 billion in 2025, a figure representing a 733 percent year-over-year increase.

What Comes Next

dtcpay's immediate traction is most visible in Southeast Asia. Metro Singapore became the first department store in the country to accept stablecoin payments using the company's infrastructure, a retail proof point that gives enterprise sales teams a concrete reference case.

With the Series A now closed, attention will shift to whether the new enterprise portal gains traction among regional businesses seeking faster and lower-cost cross-border settlement. SBI's network across Japan, Southeast Asia, and South Korea adds a distribution dimension that pure fintech investors typically cannot offer, and that reach will likely shape how quickly dtcpay can scale as it moves into its next phase.