One More Financial Giant Won Over by Ripple: American PNC to Adopt xCurrent

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by Julia Sakovich · 3 min read
One More Financial Giant Won Over by Ripple: American PNC to Adopt xCurrent
Photo: K L / Flickr

xCurrent developed by Ripple will be used by PNC Treasury Management to speed up processing of cross-border transactions.

Solutions and products created by blockchain startup Ripple are moving towards wide adoption. More and more major financial institutions are joining the Ripple Network starting using the tools developed by the company.

Recently it has been announced that PNC Treasury Management, which is a subsidiary of a US-based banking firm PNC Financial Services Group widely known as just PNC, became part of RippleNet. PNC has revealed its plans to use one of Ripple’s products – xCurrent – that will help the firm to speed up cross-border payments made by U.S. commercial clients.

PNC is one of top 10 U.S. banks by assets held. The bank’s client base includes eight million customers in the United States. Though it offers retail services in some states, its main activity is focused on corporate and institutional banking services.

Moreover, PNC has already completed a pilot phase and proof-of-concept for the payment rail and now the firm is absolutely ready to start utilizing xCurrent in a production environment. At the very beginning, PNC Treasury Management is planning to use the product only for accepting inbound transactions.

Ripple’s senior vice president for product management, Asheesh Birla, expressed the following opinion regarding PNC’s plans:

“I think the important thing is this is not a test. Ripple only signs production clients, so they are taking this product into production. There’s no pilot, there’s no proof-of-concept – that’s already been done. They’ve committed to [transactions] with other customers.”

Marcus Treacher, the senior vice president of Customer Success at Ripple, also commented this new move of PNC sharing his excitement about it:

“For far too long, the technology underlying cross-border payments has been opaque, slow and costly. PNC, as an innovative and forward-thinking institution, understands the promise of emerging technologies like blockchain. Quite a few payment providers have joined RippleNet recently, so it’s great to see one of the major U.S. banks come on board as well.”

Through xCurrent, U.S. business clients of PNC will get an opportunity to enjoy instant payments received from their foreign buyers according to their invoices. With such a tool PNC will have a more feasible way to manage its account receivables and working capital.

Now xCurrent is widely considered to be a blockchain technology, nevertheless, Ripple’s team insists that it is not so. According to Ripple, it doesn’t have anything in common even with distributed ledger technology. Instead, xCurrent is based on a so-called “interledger protocol,” which makes instant settlement real.

Though PNC is starting only with xCurrent, Ripple hopes that it will continue with joining xRapid platform as well. Currently, PNC is not going to use Ripple’s XRP either, nevertheless, its decision to become a participant of Ripple’s network can be already viewed as a sign of its confidence in Ripple solutions and its readiness to move away from SWIFT.

But it’s worth mentioning that the value of XRP is rather significantly influenced by Ripple’s performance. Just recently, it has gained  23 percent, partially due to expectation of the upcoming launch of Ripple’s new xRapid product.

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