Ripple Releases 2019 Report on Blockchain and Crypto, Says 75% of Financial Service Providers Interested in Digital Assets

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Three quarters of the financial service providers polled in Ripple’s new survey indicate they are “very to extremely interested in digital assets.”

Conducted by a third party in August and September, the survey polled 1,053 respondents across 21 countries, all of whom “are directly involved with payment services at their organization,” according to Ripple’s report on the data. Their companies include retail bankers, digital bankers, payment aggregators and money transmitters.

More than a third of those respondents say they are “in production” in terms of implementing blockchain, and 27% say they’re nearing actual implementation.

Although those numbers represent a minority, the results of the survey indicate financial services providers are almost uniformly interested in exploring blockchain’s potential, according to Ripple.

“Not only do this year’s respondents see greater market opportunities, the majority of them (97%) are either implementing or evaluating blockchain technology to capture these opportunities. They also express a stronger understanding of blockchain’s strengths than last year’s respondents:

• Respondents see opportunity to double down in cross-border payments by both expanding existing services into new regions and introducing new services in existing regions.

• They perceive stronger demand in three of the top four cross-border payments services: digital payments for goods and services, mass disbursements and remittances. Of the three, remittances show the strongest jump in perceived demand, especially by respondents who are in or near production with blockchain technology for payments.”

Despite increasing interest in the sector, about 35% of respondents say they’re concerned about the difficulty of integrating blockchain and digital assets, and 28% think integration is too expensive.

Similar levels of survey participants say they’re concerned with regulatory issues: 35% say regulations are too uncertain, and 32% believe they’re too prohibitive.

The survey did not target Ripple customers. It did, however, weigh responses based on the total in and outflow of remittances at the country level, in an effort to “have a country mix that represented the addressable market for blockchain in payments.”