PNC Becomes the First U.S. Bank Using RippleNet for Cross-Border Payments

PNC Becomes the First U.S. Bank Using RippleNet for Cross-Border Payments

Teuta Franjkovic By Teuta Franjkovic Updated 3 min read
PNC Becomes the First U.S. Bank Using RippleNet for Cross-Border Payments
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

American banking giant PNC has become the first bank in the country to use Ripple’s blockchain network, RippleNet, for processing cross border payments.

PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. finally went live with the blockchain payments platform RippleNet. By doing this, it became a first-ever American bank that decided to process cross-border payments just a year after they decided to adopt Ripple’s technology.

As one of the ten largest banks in the U.S., the inaugurating of PNC represents a big step for RippleNet. Existing business clients of the company will now be able to use the network in order to be presented with the international payments in the immediate time – all thanks to Ripple’s technology.

PNC had first revealed its plans to use RippleNet and xCurrent back in September 2018. At the time, the announcement caused the value of Ripple’s digital token XRP‘s worth to fall.

At the time of writing, XRP went down 5.02% to $0.252349. However, Ripple’s head of Global Institutional Markets, Breanne M. Madigan says that price is not the only parameter company insiders are eyeing.

She explained that some XRP data shows that while overall XRP trading volume was down nearly 65%, XRP/MXN volumes on, for example, Mexican crypto exchange Bitcoin went up more than 25% during the same period.

Madigan added that these data are a sign of a real use case driving real volume.

Let’s just mention that in June this year, Ripple announced they will purchase a 10% stake in MoneyGram, the second-largest world remittances company, as the part of their $30 million partnership with the entity. Main condition was that MoneyGram begins to use xRapid.

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse later said that a year from now, the MoneyGram deal “will have a more consequential impact on the crypto markets than the Libra white paper.”

RippleNet presents a singular, global network of banks and financial institutions that can send and receive payments through the use of Ripple’s distributed financial technology.

It is meant to manufacture real-time and cheap payments by helping as a united decentralized global network of banks and financial institutions.

Also, RippleNet will now be able to deliver a cooperative experience for worldwide international payments only by removing the fragmentation in payment processing.

Contributors of RippleNet are should also overcome the inefficiencies that a fragmented payment system produces as well.

The company decided to use blockchain in order to cross border payments with the main goal of decreasing all the fees and times of waiting. It also works with two main functions. First is its messaging system that uses the xCurrent payment protocol. The second one is a blockchain-based token, XRP, which allows for fast transfers with the xRapid solution.

Previously, Ripple was separating its xCurrent and xRapid offerings; however, now, the members of RippleNet can use just one service or both.

For example, remittance firm Ria became a member of the network earlier this year and it decided to use xCurrent. On the other hand, PNC and Santander both use xCurrent for payment processing.

xCurrent is Ripple’s enterprise solution responsible for facilitating the instantaneous settlement and end-to-end tracking of cross-border payments between RippleNet members.

RippleNet directly competes with SWIFT, that represents a more conventional system and sees slower settlement times.

The xCurrent payment messaging protocol is pretty much advantageous than the SWIFT’s version. SWIFT, however, is no strange to the blockchain technology, because it’s proved to have completed a proof of concept and worked with R3.

In other news, Japanese company SBI Holdings announced they would pay dividends to shareholders in the XRP equivalent through the VCTrade exchange. As per the announcement, anyone who owns more than 100 shares of the company will receive 30 XRP on accounts on VCTrade.

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Teuta Franjkovic

Experienced creative professional focusing on financial and political analysis, editing daily newspapers and news sites, economical and political journalism, consulting, PR and Marketing. Teuta’s passion is to create new opportunities and bring people together.

Teuta Franjkovic on X

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