Shinhan Bank, a leading financial institution based in Seoul, has announced that it will be offering bitcoin remittance services for the Korea-China corridor.

Brave New Coin reported that this marks the first time that a bitcoin value transfer system has been announced by a major bank. Powered by Streami, the new service would go live in December.

Spread across 140 overseas networks in 19 countries, Shinhan currently has assets of more than 285 trillion Korean won (US$251 billion). Moreover, the bank has over 8,531 employees at 723 branches and has won several prestigious awards in the Asian banking sector, including Best retail bank in 2015.

Streami is a Seoul-based startup which describes itself as “Blockchain remittance middleware and infra provider for financial service providers”. Launched last year, the company partners with trusted market makers and various value-transfer networks to ensure secure, fast and cheap cross-border remittance.

Shinhan Bank invested 500 million Korean won in Streami through a direct stock purchase, after the startup won an incubator program early in 2015, run by Shinhan’s Future Lab. In addition, the company also raised a further US$2 million in seed funding in December 2015, drawing support from Shinhan Bank, Shinhan Data Systems, ICB, Bluepoint Partners, the Digital Currency Group and Fenbushi Capital.

While the company was launched to specifically target the Korean-Chinese remittance corridor, Junhaeng Lee, Streami CEO, told Brave New Coin that the company is already working on other corridors with licensed partners.

“At the moment we are only handling the volume ‘out of’ Shinhan Bank.  We plan to expand into the ‘inbound’ ASAP but it will take some time given the bank pace in system integration & compliance approvals”, Lee said.

According to BNC, until cryptocurrency transactions become fully legal in the country, Streami will transfer money to one of the bitcoin exchanges in Hong Kong, which will forward bitcoins to a participating Chinese bitcoin exchange that converts it to local currency for the recipient.

“We are not dependent on one or two exchanges. We are using many regulated exchange for on-ramping”, Lee added.