Japanese financial services giant SBI Group has announced that it is cancelling its partnership Huobi cryptocurrency exchange.

The two companies entered into a partnership in December 2017 as SBI was gearing up to launch its cryptocurrency exchange. In October 2016, SBI announced the establishment of a new company called SBI Virtual Currencies Co., Ltd., (SBI VC) which will provide exchange services for digital currencies.

SBI VC received the approval from Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA) in September 2017.

In a press release dated March 09, SBI Group said that it has decided to discontinue its tie up with Huobi Group and its plan to use the latter’s technology, know-how and human resources.

“In establishing the system of SBI Virtual Currency that manages the virtual currency exchange, we will establish a flexible development system that can respond promptly to situations where recent security enhancement is required and prompt trends in domestic and overseas regulations. We also decided to stop capital and business tie-ups with the Huobi Group as we are planning to build a system with enhanced security and sufficient processing capacity by utilizing SBI Group's resources,” SBI Holdings said (loosely translated).

Recently, SBI Group postponed the launch of the cryptocurrency exchange, citing that the delay is to boost security measures. It also announced earlier this year that SBI VC will exclusively list Ripple’s XRP token at launch.