Ripple’s xRapid Payments Product Gets Commercially Launched On Day 1 of Swell Conference 2018

On Monday, October 1st, Ripple kicked-off its Swell Conference 2018, a two day event attended by key representatives from the global financial space. In an official announcement published by the company, it said that the much-awaited real-time cross-border settlement platform is launched with three financial institutions.

MercuryFX, Cuallix, and Catalyst Corporate Federal Credit Union are the three big players who have joined upfront to use the xRapid payment services. All these three players provides remittance services to its customers across Europe, Mexico, and the United States.

Ripple xRapid payments solution poses a direct challenge to the existing SWIFT systems used by the banks. Ripple says that its xRapid solution improves the global transaction costs by 40-70 percent while reduces the transaction speed drastically, from existing two-three to just over two minutes.

Ripple says “xRapid eliminates the need for a pre-funded nostro account when executing a cross-border payment. It sources liquidity from XRP on exchanges around the world. As a result, cross-border transactions occur in minutes and at a lower cost compared to traditional methods, which take days and incur high foreign exchange fees.”

However, to be noted, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has clarified previously that Ripple and XRP both operate independently. Ripple is private company whereas XRP is a native cryptocurrency of the open source network XRP Ledger.

In a word with CNBC, Asheesh Birla, Ripple's senior vice president of product, said: "I'm really excited to bring the product into the market at a time when there is a lot of skeptcism about digital assets and their real use case.”

He further added: "Here's something where we're finding a ton of value and providing a ton of value to our customers using digital assets to move money more efficiently.”

Birla additionally said that apart from Mercury FX and Cuallix, there are number of other money transfer giants like MoneyGram and Western Union who are considering to adopt the solutions. He also said that banks are not the primary adopters of the xRapid product. However, he believes that as regulatory prevails globally, he expects banks to gradually start adopting it.

"We have a lot of business with payment providers," Bairla said. He further added that "in certain markets I think banks will move faster towards leveraging digital assets, and so it really depends on the regulation and the local market.”

Birla believes that emerging markets are potential contenders in the future to incorporate the xRapid product at the end. Birla said: "Those countries have a lot more forward-looking regulation when it comes to digital assets, so I would envision that those would be the first bank adopters."