Saudi Arabia To Support Ripple’s xCurrent

12 months after Ripple signed an agreement with the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority (SAMA), the authorities Head of Innovation, Mohsen Al Zahrani has confirmed that the KSA Central bank won’t be using the technology but two local banks will instead adopt xCurrent and roll out their services by March this year.

This is news that the community needed to hear after the leaving of the Chief Marketing Strategist left from the $49 billion start-ups, confirmation like this is positive and sends a big message to the community.

After news of this surfaced, the international head of infrastructure innovation at Ripple, Dilip Rao said:

“Central banks around the world are leaning into blockchain technology in recognition of how it can transform cross-border payments, resulting in lower barriers to trade and commerce for both corporates and consumers. SAMA is leading the charge as the first central bank to provide resources to domestic banks that want to enable instant payments using Ripple’s innovative blockchain solution.”

Despite the Saudi Authority not accepting the technology, they will still back the crypto project and help educate it and even encourage local banks to make use of xCurrent. Unlike their rival SWIFT, which operates in batches and isn’t the right fit for high volume transactions, the xCurrent system is the complete opposite as it allows participants to send high volume, high-value transactions almost instantly and with low fees.

- We (central bank) don’t implement Ripple technology but we still work with Ripple to educate and encourage commercial banks to use their technology.

- 2 banks will go live with Ripple this quarter (Q1 2019) very soon

Mohsen Alzahrani - SAMA pic.twitter.com/FQtL8bzmJT

— Steven Diep (@DiepSanh) February 12, 2019

The solution is just one of three that is promoted by Ripple Inc that enables cross-border payment complete with an end to end tracking capabilities but it doesn’t incorporate XRP. nevertheless, “upgrade to the latest version allows participating banks to upgrade and incorporate XRP through xRapid” even so, SAMA is a central body which looks over all the payments whether they are incoming or outgoing, the vast network of the countries ATMs banks and point of sales.

Last October, the Head of Innovation at SAMA Mohsen Al Zahrani spoke on the matter in regards to their approach to the technology and prodding banks to innovate.

“For us, it’s more about efficiency. We’re not anti-digital. Which is why we’re experimenting with issuing our own digital currency. But there are questions about how issues these and how, who controls it, who guarantees it.”