EXCLUSIVE— Ripple expects the banks integrated into its new Japanese MoneyTap app will create new businesses and features on the platform, similar to the way companies are doing on China’s most popular mobile payment service, Alipay.

Emi Yoshikaw, director of joint venture partnerships at Ripple,  told Bank Innovation in an emailed statement:

The Japanese government has advocated a transition to a cashless society, seeing it an economic growth opportunity. We believe the Ripple-powered payments platform as well as MoneyTap will be a major contributor to the efforts.

We also expect that banks to innovate new businesses off of the next gen platform just like Alipay has done it on top of its payments platform.

The MoneyTap app, which was released last week, will help bring faster payments to about 80% of the banking sector in Japan, according to company statements—a percentage that’s considered high, since Japan has not yet embraced digital payments, Ripple told Bank Innovation.

Yoshikaw said of the app:

It will support retail payments at first, followed by corporate.The app requires a bank account, a phone number or QR code to send a payment and will also use biometric authentication.

The app currently allows for domestic money transfers over Ripple’s blockchain platform—but works with fiat and not cryptocurrency, Yoshikaw said.

In the future, the app—which works with the Japanese bank consortium, beginning with banks SBI Net Sumishin, Suruga Bank, and Resona Bank—could support cross-border transactions, Yoshikaw said. Settlement on the app should only take seconds, he noted, because the payments are run through Ripple’s distributed ledger platform and not via a centralized platform.

When the app opens support to corporate payments, we will  have to watch and see if Ripple’s platform will be able to mimic Alipay’s success with new businesses and services.