Malaysian Lending Giant CIMB Joins Ripple’s Cross-Border Payment Network

Malaysian lending giant CIMB Group Holdings Bhd has joined Ripple’s (XRP) cross-border payments network RippleNet, Bloomberg reports Nov. 15.

The $53.5 billion market cap CIMB will integrate Ripple’s XCurrent product, a software solution for expediting cross-border payments, for its “SpeedSend” remittance product. As Bloomberg reports, CIMB’s product serves multiple Southeast Asian markets, including the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand.

As Bloomberg notes, Ripple is vying to outstrip incumbent money transfer giant SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) in the global cross-border payments industry. The latter’s website claims SWIFT currently serves over 11,000 clients across 200 countries.

In an interview with Bloomberg at the Singapore Fintech Festival 2018 this week, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse responded to the reporter’s question in regard to rumors of a possible SWIFT partnership or even future takeover by Ripple, saying:

“Swift is owned by banks, Ripple is here to help the banks [...] what we are doing on a day-to-day basis is in fact taking over SWIFT. We’ve signed well over 100 banks, some of the world’s largest SWIFT-enabled banks are now using Ripple’s technology.”

Bloomberg cites data from the World Bank that forecasts that the total value of global remittances is set to rise to $642 billion this year, up almost 5 percent from $613 billion in 2017.

While XCurrent does not use Ripple’s native token XRP, the latter has soared by almost 77 percent in value over the past three months, according to Cointelegraph’s Ripple Price Index.

The asset’s strong growth comes even as financial services and tech industry giants such as Standard Chartered (SC) and Ant Financial have been evolving alternative blockchain-based cross-border remittance solutions.

Just two days ago, major Japanese bank holding and financial services company MUFG announced it was also joining RippleNet to create a new cross-border payments service to Brazil, as the network continues to gain traction with banks for remittance solutions worldwide.