CoinSpeaker
Euro Exim Becomes the First Official Bank to Fully Integrate Ripple’s xRapid

Despite the initial scepticism about Ripple and its products, which made the headlines a few months ago, many banks worldwide has already successfully partnered with the company, and the list of them continues to grow. As it became known at the beginning of this week, the London-based Euro Exim Bank is going to implement the xRapid product in the coming weeks and become the first official bank to use the technology.

According to the bank’s head of compliance and operations, Graham Bright, Euro Exim plans to use XRP and the xRapid solution to minimize liquidity costs and reduce cash flow restrictions. The intention is to connect 80 countries and prove the speed and efficiency of digital currencies:

“There’s been a lot of talk around the markets about how blockchain technology can assist in trade finance. We’re interested in moving forward and creating a platform for payments for our clients who are in over 80 countries at the moment, making sure they have a smooth, frictionless way of paying local people.”

While the majority of banks and other financial institution still continues to use SWIFT, Euro Exim Bank understands that this service is several years old, it works slow and with higher costs than xRapid. Ripple’s technology, in its turn, allows for sending payments sourcing liquidity using XRP – the second largest digital asset in the market after Bitcoin (BTC).

Ripple’s digital asset opens banks and other finantial institutions the possibility to exchange the local currency for XRP and send the funds to another country converting the XRP back to another fiat currency. In other words, it allows to send funds abroad without having to think about how to pre-bank all the money in foreign accounts – financial companies hold their funds locally and control them as they wish.

According to Ripple, 200 banks worldwide has already partnered with the company to use the technology and to leverage all the perspectives it can open. Among the latest partnerships are: National Bank of Kuwait, which has joined Ripple’s blockchain-based payments network at the end of December 2018, and Australian FlashFX, which announced the successful collaboration with the company earlier this month.

As Brad Gralinhous, the CEO of Ripple recently said in an interview:

“This is the year the wheat will be separated from the chaff. Not many months ago, the media was saying no one will use XRP, which made for good skeptical headlines. Today, you can’t say that as people are starting to use XRapid because it’s better, faster and cheaper.”

Among all the 200 banks, Euro Exim Bank plans to become the first one to fully integrate the XRP-powered xRapid in the first quarter of this year.

Euro Exim Becomes the First Official Bank to Fully Integrate Ripple’s xRapid