Ripple signs up seven new banks as distributed-ledger tech gains traction.
The San Francisco-based financial technology company Ripple has signed up seven more banks to potentially use its blockchain for cross-border payments.
Santander [fortune-tech symbol=”san”], UniCredit [fortune-tech symbol=”uncff”], UBS [fortune-tech symbol=”ubs”], Reisebank, CIBC, ATB Financial and the National Bank of Abu Dhabi said Wednesday that they were working with Ripple’s technology, which uses a distributed ledger of the sort that also underpins bitcoin.
These automatically-generated ledgers have no central operator and, as they are filled, the entries become irreversible and resistant to tampering. Ripple’s ledgers hold order books with bid and ask offers, and it claims its “path-finding algorithm” finds the lowest foreign exchange rates.
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Canada’s ATB Financial and Germany’s ReiseBank used the system to make a demonstration fund transfer last week.
“Using blockchain technology, ATB Financial became the first financial institution in Canada to complete an overseas payment in a matter of seconds. Without blockchain, that transaction would have taken two to six business days,” ATB chief strategy and operations officer Curtis Stange said in a statement .
Ripple said its network now includes 12 of the world’s top 50 banks, and it has 10 banks in “commercial deal phases.”If you want to see how its ledger-filling system works, here you go: Meanwhile, also in the world of blockchain technology, social payments firm Circle has raised $60 million from Chinese investors, led by IDG Capital partners.Circle, which already enjoys the backing of Goldman Sachs [fortune-tech symbol=”gs”] and others, lets individuals send money to one another across borders, with bitcoin’s blockchain as the underlying platform. It is currently partnering with banks such as the U.K.’s Barclays [fortune-tech symbol=”bcs”]. For more on blockchains, watch our video. In a Wednesday statement , Circle said it was developing […]
