Support for private transactions and infinite scalability coming soon
San Francisco, Calif. – October 6, 2015 – Banks now have a practical, proven way to leverage distributed financial technology that delivers faster, more reliable, less costly cross-border payment services for their customers. Ripple, the provider of global financial settlement services and solutions formerly known as Ripple Labs, today introduced complete solutions for cross-currency settlement and FX market making.
The global cross-border payments industry generates $22.5 trillion in annual volume, but is plagued by $1.6 trillion in costs, based on the Federal Reserve’s average global cost of international transfers. These costs derive from antiquated payments infrastructure and are absorbed by all parties in the transaction chain. After months of private testing, Ripple has launched two new solutions for license – Cross-Currency Settlement and FX Market Making – with features and support that help banks meet rising customer and regulatory demand for faster, less costly payments while gaining a competitive advantage.
“We’re focused on modernizing payments infrastructure to compress costs for banks and their customers,” said Ripple CEO and co-founder Chris Larsen. “It is hard to believe, but outmoded payment infrastructure forces banks and their corporate customers to prefund foreign accounts for international payments, but then provides few assurances that cross-border transactions will actually settle. With Ripple’s new solutions, banks can now achieve real-time, certain settlement at the lowest total cost possible.”
Available for licensing, Ripple’s two solutions deliver new, unprecedented cross-border settlement capabilities, including:
- Access to a growing, global network of financial institutions and market makers. Ripple enables banks to transact directly with one another instead of through correspondent banks. With this launch, Ripple is now compatible with industry standards FIX, JSON and .NET for easy market maker integration.
- Complete certainty of settlement. An industry first, Ripple’s new Cross-Currency Settlement solution enables banks to exchange payment and fee information before payments execute, and then confirm when the payment settles, minimizing the risk of failure. Funds settle between Ripple-connected banks in seconds with end-to-end visibility into and traceability of every transaction.
- A lower total cost of settlement for banks and their customers. Ripple eliminates processing fees, reduces operational and risk-based costs, and most significantly, compresses the opportunity cost of prefunding accounts.
As banks and market makers continue to adopt Ripple, the network grows in liquidity and geographic reach, exponentially increasing the efficiency of cross-border payments. Banks and market makers always choose the institutions on the network with which they transact, and can apply their own compliance systems, rules sets, and messaging standards through Ripple. A number of leading banks have completed Ripple pilots and are now designing commercial implementations.
“We are encouraged by our partners’ positive reviews of Ripple during their pilots and by their eagerness to bring Ripple-powered services to their customers,” Larsen continued. “But, we’ve only just begun. Through hundreds of conversations with financial institutions over the past two years, we’ve gleaned important feedback about what to develop next.”
Based on partner feedback, Ripple will soon support the ability to:
- Transact privately;
- Process an unlimited number of transactions at once;
- Denominate fees in a bank’s local currency.
Banks already using Ripple will be able to easily migrate to this updated version when it becomes available. Read more about how Ripple is building these capabilities by implementing the Interledger Protocol.
Ripple also announced today that Santander InnoVentures, Santander Group’s $100 million fintech venture capital fund, has made an investment in the company, raising Ripple’s total Series A funding round to $32 million.
“The world of distributed financial technology is fast moving towards a new Internet of Value where value can be exchanged much like information today on the web,” added Larsen. “The sum total of these new solutions, partners and investors is a great validation that Ripple is leading the way in the application of these technologies for global payments needs.”
To read about today’s announcements and to learn more about Ripple, please visit http://www.ripple.com.
About Ripple
Ripple provides global financial settlement solutions to ultimately enable the world to exchange value like it already exchanges information – giving rise to an Internet of Value (IoV). Ripple solutions lower the total cost of settlement by enabling banks to transact directly, without correspondent banks, and with real-time certainty of settlement. Banks around the world are partnering with Ripple to improve their cross-border payment offerings, and to join the growing, global network of financial institutions and market makers laying the foundation for the Internet of Value.
Ripple is a venture-backed startup with offices in San Francisco, New York and Sydney. As an industry advocate for the Internet of Value, Ripple sits on the Federal Reserve’s Faster Payments Task Force Steering Committee and is a member of the W3C’s Web Payments Interest Group.