Ripple: More than 20 financial institutions use xRapid

Marjan Delatinne, Ripple’s global head of banking, said that the company has 20 financial institutions utilizing its XRP-powered xRapid. During an interview with Global Trader Review, Delatinne talked about the impact xRapid has had on cross-border remittances.

“xRapid went live last October, so it’s a very new product, but we have more than 20 financial institutions using it.

When talking with banks, we still have to ensure that they understand that using this product is not around keeping XRP on their balance sheets. That’s very important for the banks to understand because they would otherwise have to report that to the regulators.

So there is still a lot of education, but what is apparent with the regional banks and also the payment service providers is that they are hungry for change and for having a competitive edge. That’s really the driver: being able to source on-demand liquidity and providing a real-time experience in terms of cross-border payments. For some difficult corridors, for instance, the Mexican peso and Philippine peso, a transaction currently takes three to four days because the underlying process is still archaic.”

So far, 13 companies have publicly said they are using or plan to adopt xRapid:

• Euro Exim Bank
• Bittrex
• Bitso
• Coins.ph
• Bitstamp
• Cuallix
• Mercury FX
• Catalyst
• SBI Virtual Currencies
• IDT
• Viamericas
• SendFriend
• Bitrue

Delatinne also believes that Facebook’s Libra will bring more credibility into the crypto space. However, she feels that Facebook will soon face significant blowback from regulators:

“Of course at this stage Libra doesn’t exist. It’s just a whitepaper. But Facebook has started with a vision, and this vision will probably evolve over time, but what we see is that their approach is not necessarily that they are going to work with the financial system. They want to completely transform it and bring a completely different experience.

Our approach is different: we are working with the system, so we haven’t been disrupting only. We are happily working with the banks, the payment service providers and the regulators.”