Ripple Labs, which is comprised of a team of cryptographers who developed the Ripple payments protocol, recently announced its products for the forex market. The company has been working with several industry leaders in the financial arena, receiving a total of $32 million in Series A funding.
The company has announced two new solutions called FX Market Making and Cross-Currency Settlement, aimed at lowering volatility and counterparty risk for banks and financial institutions conducting cross-border payments and forex activity.
Ripple Labs Innovations
Similar to the bitcoin blockchain, the Ripple protocol makes use of a distributed ledger and consensus-based decision-making models. The company is making use of this technology to provide global financial settlement solutions and lower the total cost of settlement by enabling banks to transact directly, instantly and with certainty of settlement.
Among the advantages of using this type of technology is the lower vulnerability to hacking or unauthorized alterations, as the ledger is stored and verified by a large network of computers. In addition, the time and costs incurred in trade settlement for instance can be drastically reduced with the use of this technology.
Ripple’s FX Market Making product is particularly aimed at powering a bank’s in-house trading desk or tapping the liquidity of a third-party market provider to provide more competitive forex rates for clients. Meanwhile, its Cross-Currency Settlement product can serve as an alternative to correspondent banks for international money transfers, enabling them to provide low-cost remittance services or wire transfers for its clients.
Ripple Labs has been working with banks like Westpac and Santander in tapping the distributed ledger technology for financial applications. Other global banks such as JPMorgan, Citi, Goldman Sachs, and UBS are teaming up in a collaborative project exploring the blockchain under R3 CEV, providing potential competition for the Ripple protocol.
