A breakthrough for blockchain? There has been plenty of hype over blockchain technology, which promises to speed up all sorts of financial transactions and record-keeping, but much of this has been just theory. Despite its potential, blockchain has yet to to disrupt everyday banking. News from Ripple, however, suggests this is beginning to change. The company, which is a familiar name in the digital currency realm, on Thursday announced a $55 million Series B round plus a series of partnerships with heavy-weights from the banking world. The new partners include global banks like Standard Chartered, BMO Financial Group, and Shanghai Huarui Bank. Ripple says they will join other banks using its technology to improve cross-border payments. So what exactly will this mean in practice? Ripple’s CEO Chris Larsen shared some specifics with Fortune , explaining how banks are already using Ripple for common transactions. “It’s not just experiments but getting the tools integrated into day-to-day banking. They’ve piloted it, it works and they’ve moved real money,” says Larsen. Larsen cites examples like banks carrying out foreign exchange transactions on Ripple instead of the SWIFT network, and using Ripple to facilitate escrow arrangements between corporate customers. He also suggests banks can use Ripple to help big tech customers make payments to their many small partners in other countries. Until now, Larsen notes, doing so has been impractical since such payments were slow and expensive. “Low-value payments are now possible,” Larsen says. “Now, Ripple can make it easy for Facebook and Uber and Amazon to make payments to developers in real time. It’s online and completely global.” In the bigger picture, Ripple is just one company using blockchain-related technology, which can be described as software that lets companies transfer and record assets using the Internet, to disrupt back-end financial services. Get […]
