Ripple to Bring xCurrent To Indian Banks

By Rishma Banerjee

The Fintech company Ripple has confirmed that it is actively working on integrating its instant cross border payments solution xCurrent with all major banks in India.

FinTech company Ripple aiming to integrate its instant cross border payments domain, xCurrent with all major banks in India. The announcement was made via a public presentation at the India Dapp Fest 2019, held in Bengaluru last month.
Till date, a number of financial institutions have already joined RippleNet, and are in the process of testing the xCurrent platform internally.

In the presentation, Senior Software Engineer at Ripple, Sachin Maheshwari elaborated on ‘Cross Border Payments,’ an attempt to showcase how Ripple is working on improving international payments across South Asia, particularly, in Singapore, India, and the Middle East.

According to the engineer, it will be extremely useful for banks to be able to process international transactions in real-time using its Interledger Protocol, in contrast with the costly and time-consuming ways used today.

He mentioned how he has personally worked with banks like Kotak Mahindra Bank, Axis Bank, and IndusInd Bank to incorporate xCurrent on their platform.

Senior Vice President Product Management at Ripple Asheesh Birla said,

“So now, in our pipeline, we have probably 50% of the market in India, either integrated onto Ripple or in the deal, in the pipeline to be signed. And guess what, we are going to take that back to Wells Fargo and say that ‘there’s not a better way to send into India than Ripple’.”

Maheshwari also pointed out the fact that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has displayed a certain amount of hostility towards the cryptocurrency market over the past two years.

In 2018, the RBI banned Indian financial institutions such as banks from providing services to companies associated with the digital currency industry. Due to this, all fiat-crypto corridors for traders and exchanges immobilized the entire market.

According to Maheshwari, Ripple’s xCurrent solution does not violate the guidelines set forth by the Reserve Bank of India, simply because it does not employ a cryptocurrency at all. It will be interesting to see the banking institution utilising this software in this scenario.

Rishma Banerjee

Rishma is currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree in International Relations and has a special place in her life for sifting through all sorts of random trivia, thank you very much.

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