MonetaGo, a fintech company that provides digital fraud prevention solutions, has hired Munetoshi Yamada as managing director of its newly opened Japanese operations.

Yamada joins from R3, where he served as partner manager, leading the establishment of the American company’s joint venture with SBI Holdings and driving adoption of R3’s Corda in Japan and the wider East Asian region.

His professional experience includes a stint as a university lecturer on the subject of enterprise blockchain, as well as a management role with Hitachi Consulting.

“I’m thrilled to join the MonetaGo team to continue spearheading the use of cutting-edge technologies,” says Yamada. “I look forward to working with their extraordinary team to bring their innovative products such as Secure Financing and workflow solutions to Japan and beyond.”

MonetaGo’s solution has been in full production since 2018. So far, the company says it has processed over 1.8 million financings, via a series of partnerships.

In September last year, the company brought its Secure Financing platform onto Swift’s API-enabled infrastructure as part of a proof-of-concept initiative that enables financial institutions to check for duplications of documents, from invoices to bills of lading, warehouse receipts and purchase orders, before deciding to finance them.

In a 2018 project, the company joined forces with Swift in India to enable a group of local banks to leverage the Swift messaging infrastructure to pass messages back and forth to MonetaGo’s blockchain, in order to cross-reference an invoice before committing to financing it.

The firm has also brought its platform into the ecosystem of Singapore-based trade technology platform GUUD, which provides trade finance connectivity and digitised workflow capabilities for Singapore’s Networked Trade Platform (NTP) and Singapore Customs and includes vCargo Cloud’s CamelONE trade finance platform, which was launched on the NTP in November 2019 with the backing of nine banks.

Meanwhile, in 2020, MonetaGo received a grant from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to run a proof of concept with 25 organisations to detect and prevent instances of duplicate financing. The trial was conducted over a six-month period and concluded on June 30 with positive results and feedback.

‘’Our continued expansion throughout the Apac region into Japan is a real testament to how our business continues to go from strength to strength,” says Jesse Chenard, CEO of MonetaGo. “Japan is a critical market for MonetaGo, home to some of the world’s most well-established financial institutions with operations spanning the globe. We hope to help them safeguard their global operations against fraud.’’