Santander Bank To Extend Its Ripple-Powered Payment System

The major Spanish bank Santander intends to roll out its Ripple-powered international payments system One Pay FX in Mexico in 2020. As the latest Ripple news show, a Form 20-F filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on March 6 indicates that the Santander bank will offer the services in Mexico in early 2020.

For those of you who don’t know or haven’t read about it yet, One Pay FX is an independent for of XRP and is based on Ripple’s RippleNet Technology. As such, it does not need the cryptocurrency to function, as a Santander spokesperson previously told the media.

The Form 20-F filing which is an annual report that must be submitted to the SEC by all foreign private issuers with listed equity shares on US exchanges, shows that the Santander bank describes the solution as a:

“Multi-corridor international blockchain solution […] for individuals and SMEs [small-to-medium enterprises].”

One Pay FX initially launched in four Santander banks including the Santander bank of Spain, Brazil, Poland and the United Kingdom. This was done back in 2018, and Santander Portugal and Chile joined the network in 2019.

As the blockchain news show, the true benefits as the bank claims include transparency, predictability, competitive cost and better speed. This will ostensibly counter the current customer experiences which the bank describes as “sub-optimal” and prone to “client stickiness.”

Previously, we reported that Santander bank and Ripple developed One PayFX over several years and did early trails indicating that the solution could provide improvements over traditional transfers as early as 2016. In 2015, the capital arm of the bank named InnoVentures, contributed with $4 million to Ripple’s $32 million Series A funding.

On the other hand, RippleNet was created in 2012 as a system that still does a lot of technical developments, including “core consensus improvements” according to some comments by the chief technology officer at Ripple, David Schwartz. He has also shown big interest in enabling third parties to launch other third-party cryptocurrencies including stablecoins on the XRP ledger.

Meanwhile, the Ripple XRP price on the markets continues to trade without much declines these weeks. Despite the low at $0.14 this month, XRP managed to retrace and is now above $0.17 in a new positive start of the week this Monday.