South American Banks Looking into xRapid to Cover 6 Nations

A couple of banks in South America are allegedly starting to look into the adoption of Ripple’s cross-border payments technology.

Both Scotiabank Chile and Banesco Panama are testing out how they could move capital with Ripple's xCurrent.

The report states that Banesco Panama is working with regulators to ensure it’s fully compliant and is also looking at the digital asset XRP to shift money across the globe.

“Banesco is aiming to roll out the technology between the banks in its group – covering the Dominican Republic, Panama, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Spain and Venezuela…

Banesco’s proof of concept used the xCurrent network for the funds transfer, seeing use of Ripple’s cryptocurrency XRP as being a step further than it is comfortable with.

Once integrated into the Ripple network, Banesco aims to initially offer blockchain-based transfers only between banks in the group. That’s because Banesco needs to strike a deal on rates and exchange rates bilaterally with each recipient bank.”

International payments are also being tested by Scotiabank Chile.

According to Vice President of the digital bank Daniel Kennedy, Ripple's payment network “works really well”. The capital of Peru, Lima was brought up by Kennedy as a potential place where customers could send funds however, he admits that more work needs to be done before the bank can fully and properly implement Ripple’s technology.

“As soon as you do that, the process becomes a lot more efficient, a lot more effective. And you can start having almost one account. If you’ve got a small business in Chile with clients in Lima, they can deposit into an account that has the same number and it just gets transferred. But we’re not there yet.”

The San-Francisco based firm has said that around 200 banks and financial institutions have come on-board with the firm’s international payment network xRapid. The CEO of Ripple said last week that the firm is bringing more and more clients on board at a record pace as interest in blockchain-based solutions has been growing ever since Facebook announced its new upcoming stablecoin, Libra last week.

Last week, Garlinghouse said:

“I’m going to send a case of champagne to David Marcus, the guy who runs Libra. The reason is, this week will probably be the best week of signed contracts at Ripple ever. It has been a massive call to action because Facebook kind of came out and said we don’t need Western Union anymore…”