Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse says one of its partners in Asia is now using digital assets to power cross-border payments.
Siam Commercial Bank is already using Ripple’s xCurrent to power real-time payments between Japan and Thailand. At the Singapore FinTech Festival 2018, Garlinghouse said the bank is taking things one step further, hinting that the bank is also utilizing XRP.
“One bank that I’ll highlight that has certainly been aggressive and progressive in their approach is Siam Commercial Bank in Thailand. And the work they’ve done is really setting them up to be a next generation hub. As some in the correspondent banking community retract from some parts of the Southeast Asian market, Siam Commercial is actually solving that and using blockchain and even using digital assets to help solve that problem.”
Garlinghouse says blockchain and crypto can give banks and financial institutions the freedom to move money around without having to have huge amounts of money sitting around in pre-funded accounts.
“So I think that while the speed and the dynamics that are solved from the transparency of a much better messaging system are profound, more importantly, I think, is how liquidity. And today, as many in the fintech community know, banks pre-fund accounts.
There’s almost $10 trillion parked as pre-funded accounts around the world such that banks can then debit and credit and make those cross-border payments work. We have a product that allows banks — it allows financial institutions, payment providers – to not pre-fund, thus making that trillions of dollars more active. And we think by doing this, we really do accelerate the global engine of commerce in a way that is good for corporate. It’s also good for consumers at the remittance level.”
In October, Siam Commercial Bank announced it’s working to build a new payment hub using Ripple’s technology, and plans to expand beyond its main remittance corridor between Thailand and Japan.
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