Garlinghouse Talks On Swift, Interest In Crypto & More

The CEO of the financial tech company Ripple, Brad Garlinghouse has addressed rumours regarding SWIFT and Ripple are working on a partnership behind the scenes.

As reported by the Daily Hodl, Garlinghouse recently sat down with Bloomberg where he was asked if the recent gossip is that SWIFT will be joining Ripple are true or whether they are just rumours, to which Garlinghouse responded:

“Strictly rumours. There are lots of rumours and I’m hesitant to comment on any rumour, because if you comment on the false rumours then you have to comment on the true rumours. And so you just avoid all of them.”

According to the CEO, a potential partnership with the worldwide payments network is somewhat irrelevant, because he Ripple is already taking over SWIFT:

“I think what we’re doing and executing on a day-by-day basis is, in fact, taking over Swift. In that, we’ve now signed up well over 100 banks. Some of the largest Swift-enabled banks in the world are now using Ripple’s technology.

Just last week we saw a remittance company who’s using Ripple’s technology – they reduced the price per transaction to their consumers from $20 per transaction to $2 per transaction, and they saw an 800% increase in usage overnight. That’s the type of dynamic that Swift isn’t able to support that we’re able to address right now. And that’s something we saw just in the last couple of weeks. So, we certainly want to see banks succeed in this new world order and take advantage of these technologies. To the extent we can work with Swift to do that, then that’s great.”

Garlinghouse went onto discuss where SWIFT stands on the blockchain, saying the technology has proved itself and is here to stay:

“We feel like blockchain technologies are a massive step forward in terms of how correspondent banking has historically worked. The technologies that banks use today that Swift developed decades ago. It really hasn’t evolved and kind of kept up with the market.

We feel like we’re here to help the banks. Swift is owned by the banks. There have been opportunities where maybe there’s partnership opportunities. We haven’t been able to bring those to fruition.”

The CEO then goes onto discuss XRP and he says that the cryptocurrency is solving some massive problems on a big scale.

“I think any digital asset in the long term is going to be valued based upon the problems it’s solving. Is it solving a real problem at scale? I think people increasingly have seen that XRP is solving real problems. Both how Ripple is using it to solve a cross-border payments problem. Selling those technologies to banks and financial institutions.

And I think this is a nascent market. There’s a lot of speculation. There’s, frankly, a lot of hype. And as we separate that hype from reality, you’re going to see diversion happen. So I think one of the reasons XRP has outperformed is because you’re seeing there’s real use case. It’s solving a real problem.”

What are your thoughts? Let us know what you think down below!