SWIFT ‘Swiftly’ Deny Ripple As R3 Partner Up

Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, also known as SWIFT, has signed a deal with R3, the United States based blockchain startup. The new partnership will look at helping SWIFT compete with the ever-growing threats of fintech and blockchain solutions provided by institutions such as TransferWise and Ripple.

Under the new deal, SWIFT will test its GPI Link through R3’s Corda platform. For those that don’t know, Corda is an open source blockchain platform which uses digital tokens including XRP to settle transactions. Even so, because of the rivalry between SWIFT and Ripple, there is a high chance that SWIFT and R2’s partnership won’t include Ripple’s native token, XRP.

Through implementing GPI with R3, SWIFT aims to provide quick and transparent payment services to its customers.

Speaking at the Paris Fintech Forum, SWIFT CEO Gottfried Leibbrandt said that they will be making an announcement later today of a “proof-of-concept with the R3 blockchain on a trade where you can initiate a payment on the trade platform and then it goes into GPI. We’re exploring interconnectivity with a lot of things, and banks have always been a part of that interconnectivity.”

In 2017, SWIFT released the Global Payment Initiative, also known as GPI. The Initiative was one of SWIFT’s plans to improve its cross-border payment solutions. The technology brings in several significant improvements on how global settlements are handled. The technology is set to become the standard for all payments made on the SWIFT network. In fact, at the time of writing, there are more than 300 banks using the service.

Swiftly Avoiding Ripple

Over the course of the past year, there have been a lot of rumours flying about in regards to the potential collaboration between both Ripple and SWIFT. But in the end, this was just speculation and both companies firmly denied the rumours that there were any past discussions between them. As reported by Coindoo, the CEO of Ripple, Brad Garlinghouse, said that both companies were direct competitors in the remittance space. He says down in an interview with Bloomberg which resulted in Garlinghouse criticising SWIFT and thus ruled out any potential talks for the two firms. The CEO made is clear that Ripple is not hoping to work with SWIFT but instead, overtake it.

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