Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA (BBVA), the second largest Spanish bank recently conducted a successful trial of its blockchain solution for fund transfers. The new solution is found to cut down the time taken for international fund transfer to few seconds from four days.
The number of blockchain trials conducted by the banking sector is increasing every day. The banking and financial institutions have been working on developing blockchain-based solutions to suit their operational needs for a while now. Most of these projects have already attained completion, and are now being subjected to trials to ensure that they work as intended.
BBVA’s blockchain solution is built on the Ripple protocol, which is quite popular among banks and finserv companies. As a part of the trial, the bank transferred about EUR 50 from Spain to Mexico at 81 percent lesser fee than conventional SWIFT based transfer method.
According to reports, the bank will soon roll out the new blockchain solution to its corporate customers. The Ripple-based solution will enable companies using BBVA to execute international transactions and make payments to their overseas suppliers in no time while keeping the costs to a minimum. In addition, the facility to track fund transfers which come as part of the Ripple platform makes it even more convenient.
Explaining the advantage of the new blockchain solution, BBVA’s Head of Digital Transformation in Investment Banking Unit, Alicia Pertusa said,
“It’s not just the real-time transfer that’s important here but the information we can send with the payment. That’s very relevant for our clients because they could begin streamlining their reconciliation systems.”
Ripple is one of the few blockchain protocols that are widely used in the banking sector. Other leading alternatives currently being implemented in the industry includes R3 Consortium’s Corda, Hyperledger Project’s Fabric and more. Meanwhile, Ripple continues to expand its reach by actively approaching and engaging banking institutions. It is just a matter of time before the entire banking industry replaces SWIFT and adopts blockchain networks.
Ref: American Banker | Image: NewsBTC