Latin American banks testing out Ripple’s xCurrent

Latin American banks Banesco Panamá and Scotiabank Chile are both testing out Ripple’s xCurrent to move capital. According to a report by financial news agency iupana, Banesco Panamá is working closely with regulators to ensure that their actions are fully compliant.

“Banesco is aiming to roll out the technology between the banks in its group – covering the Dominican Republic, Panama, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Spain and Venezuela…

Banesco’s proof of concept used the xCurrent network for the funds transfer, seeing use of Ripple’s cryptocurrency XRP as being a step further than it is comfortable with.

Once integrated into the Ripple network, Banesco aims to offer blockchain-based transfers only between banks in the group initially. That’s because Banesco needs to strike a deal on rates and exchange rates bilaterally with each recipient bank.” 

Daniel Kennedy, the Vice President Digital bank at Scotiabank Chile, stated that xCurrent “works really well” and Peru is a potential place where customers could send funds. He, however, admitted that more work needed to be done before Ripple’s tech could be integrated fully:

“As soon as you do that, the process becomes a lot more efficient, a lot more effective. And you can start having almost one account. If you’ve got a small business in Chile with clients in Lima, they can deposit into an account that has the same number and it just gets transferred. But we’re not there yet.”

The price of XRP/USD has remained indifferent to this news. Ripple suffered a bearish Sunday and Monday, wherein the price fell from $0.474 to $0.471 over the course of two days.