Ripple (XRP): the banking giant launches XRP-based money transfers

At the Financial Sector Conference on April 24, Saudi British Bank (SABB) announced the launch of its Instant Cross-Border Transfer Service, a payments infrastructure based on the Ripple blockchain network that utilizes crypto asset XRP for liquidity. With nearly $50 billion in assets, SABB initially joined the Ripple network in January 2018 with the support of the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority (SAMA) to use emerging technology in the blockchain to process payments.

The bank said that it conducted its first pilot transaction on the Ripple blockchain network later that year in December, continuing to collaborate with Ripple to implement blockchain technology onto the bank’s payments system. Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of Ripple, has always been consistent on his vision of overtaking Swift to become a dominant banking infrastructure provider.

Speaking to Bloomberg in November 2018, Garlinghouse said: The technologies that banks use today that Swift developed decades ago really hasn’t evolved or kept up with the market. Swift said not that long ago they didn’t see blockchain as a solution to correspondent banking. We’ve got well over 100 of their customers saying they disagree. What we’re doing and executing on a day-by-day basis is, in fact, taking over Swift.

For Ripple to compete against Swift, which could be challenging in the near to medium term because of the existing relationship between Swift and the world’s biggest banks, it would need to secure as many banks as possible as partners to raise the liquidity of XRP and improve the usability Ripple blockchain.