Could Barclays And Ripple Partner Up?

It’s been a while since new Ripple partnership rumours hit the headlines, though this one has surfaced with quite a big impact. Before we begin, let’s remember that Ripple are now an integral part of Santander’s current retail and institutional banking service. As it stands, Ripple technologies power Santander’s OnePayFX mobile phone app and we also know that within Santander, a range of testing is taking place within Ripple’s other blockchain technologies.

No, Santander are not adopting XRP any time soon, but could local rivals Barclays beat them too it altogether?

According to Finextra, Barclays, the Mastercard Foundation and Ripple have entered a $1.7 million funding round to assist an international payment service provider, SendFriend:

“Founded at MIT by a group of individuals with roots at The World Bank and MoneyGram, SendFriend plans to launch in New Jersey, opening its first remittance corridor between the United States and The Philippines. The company, an alumni of Barclays' accelerator programme, has stuck an agreement with Ripple to use XRP as a liquidity vehicle for cross-border payments, enabling SendFriend to circumvent the corresponding banking system and convert USD to XRP to PHP in a matter of seconds.”

The super exciting part of this announcement is that yes, Barclays are involved, but most importantly, XRP will be used as a solution within SendFriend’s future operations.

No partnership yet

We should highlight that this funding round is not confirmation that Ripple and Barclays are going to be working together, but it does prove that the two organisations do have a common business interest and most importantly, confirms that the pair now have a mutual connection through their investment in SendFriend.

According to Finextra, Yuan Ruan the founder of 8 Decimal Capital, another company involved in this latest funding round has said:

"This is a highly competitive space with longtime incumbents, but we are confident in the success of SendFriend. SendFriend has a good combination of an experienced team, large $650 billion remittance market, investors that provide more than just capital, and a growth strategy focused on more than revenue from transactions including APIs and white-label solutions."

Simply put, if SendFriend is a success, could Barclays use this to move one step closer to Ripple adoption?