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European financial giant The Santander Group is reported to be launching a cross-border foreign exchange application on Friday based on blockchain technology developed by Ripple.
Ripple Partners with Santander on New Foreign Exchange App
The Financial Times reported on Thursday that the Spanish based banking group in partnership with Ripple have created an app they are calling One Pay FX which will be launched in four countries – Spain, the U.K., Brazil, and Poland.
The application is a product of the ongoing partnership between Ripple and Santander, which was one of the original investors in Ripples A series funding in 2015.
The One Pay FX app is built on Ripple’s distributed ledger technology and is rolling out after two years of development. The product will make Santander one of the first banks to offer blockchain – based foreign exchange payments to its customers.
First trialed among Santander’s UK employees in 2016 the app is based on Ripple’s xCurrent platform. That is a distributed network created to facilitate cross-border transactions. Neither X-current nor the One Pay FX app utilizes XRP, the cryptocurrency derived from Ripple’s blockchain protocol.
Santander Group says it expects to extend the service to additional countries in the near future and is considering making the service available to other financial institutions as well. Transactions from the initial four countries covered by the app may account for close to half of Santander’s retail consumers according to the original FT report.
This announcement comes only days after Ripple announced its $25 million XRP investment in a fund dedicated to blockchain technology development. As reported in NewsBTC Ripple added its $25 to the $150 million fund managed by Blockchain Capital Parallel IV, LP “to be invested in entrepreneurial enterprises which can find additional uses for Ripple’s blockchain technology.”
Ripple says XRP is not a Security
In related news, the debate over whether XRP is to be considered a security or not has returned after the President of Coinbase made the implication in a recent interview.
Asiff Hirji told CNBC’s “Fast Money” panel that currently Coinbase lists all cryptocurrencies for which there is a clear regulatory certainty – XRP is not one of them.
The question of what qualifies as a security in the cryptocurrency market is still unclear as the SEC puts off making a final distinction while referring both exchanges and consumers to the Howey Test of 1946 in order to make their own decisions.
Ripple’s chief market strategist, Cory Johnson responded on CNBC by saying
“We absolutely are not a security. We don’t meet the standards for what a security is based on the history of court law,”
Image from Shutterstock
