xRapid Being Used By 20 Financial Institutions Including SendFriend And Euro Exim Bank

The global head of banking at Ripple, Marjan Delatinne has said that the firm now has twenty clients on board using the xRapid platform.

Speaking in an interview with Global Trader Review, Delatinne notes the use case for xRapid and the impact that it could have on cross-border remittances, especially in nations where it’s slower and more expensive to shift capital.

“xRapid went live last October, so it’s a very new product, but we have more than 20 financial institutions using it.

When talking with banks, we still have to ensure that they understand that using this product is not around keeping XRP on their balance sheets. That’s very important for the banks to understand because they would otherwise have to report that to the regulators.

So there is still a lot of education, but what is apparent with the regional banks and also the payment service providers is that they are hungry for change and for having a competitive edge. That’s really the driver: being able to source on-demand liquidity and providing a real-time experience in terms of cross-border payments. For some difficult corridors, for instance, the Mexican peso and Philippine peso, a transaction currently takes three to four days because the underlying process is still archaic.”

Thirteen firms have so far publicly announced that they are using, or planning to use, xRapid. Both SendFriend and Euro Exim have made some recent announcements in that SF will use xRapid to fuel cross-border remittances between the United States and the Philippines and Euro Exim revealing that it will use the technology to shift money across eighty countries.

Aside from SendFriend and Euro Exim Bank, the other firms include:

• Bittrex
• Bitso
• Coins.ph
• Bitstamp
• Cuallix
• Mercury FX
• Catalyst
• SBI Virtual Currencies
• IDT
• Viamericas
• Bitrue

The San-Fransico based firm is currently working to open more payment corridors for xRapid following the launch of the product in Mexico and the Philippines. The Ripple partner Mercury FX has said that it is looking to expand its use of xRapid to Canada, the Middle East and eight other nations.

Delatinne also spoke on the upcoming Libra stablecoin from Facebook to which he says:

“Of course at this stage Libra doesn’t exist. It’s just a whitepaper. But Facebook has started with a vision, and this vision will probably evolve over time, but what we see is that their approach is not necessarily that they are going to work with the financial system. They want to completely transform it and bring a completely different experience.

Our approach is different: we are working with the system, so we haven’t been disrupting only. We are happily working with the banks, the payment service providers and the regulators.”