Ripple News: Boosts X-Border Partnership Tally

Ripple has continued to add to its cross-border payments roster. News came this past week that Ria Money Transfer, billed as the second-largest money transfer portal, has linked with Ripple to offer instant money transfers.

Ria is part of Euronet, and offers services across 155 countries. As reported by BTCWires, Ria is dependent on its agents, and more than 370,000 physical locations located across the globe.

In the drive to blockchain-underpinned payment services, Ripple has been targeting cross-border efforts. Juan Bianchi, CEO of Euronet, said, “Ria’s integration with Ripple serves to build rails for an innovative payment infrastructure that seeks to provide easier access to potential partners, while delivering faster and cleaner payments to its users.”

Separately, Ripple CTO David Schwartz said via a Twitter post that the latest version of xCurrent, version 4.0, has gone live, and that an upgrade is in progress. The solution helps banks settle cross-border payments with end-to-end tracking, with the aim for more transparency in cross-border efforts. The CTO said that the upgraded xCurrent option would offer banks an easier integration experience, and access features such as Multi-hop and xRapid support.

SWIFT, Too

Separately, Ripple competitor SWIFT had some news of its own. Maybank said it has become the first bank in Malaysia to deploy the SWIFT global payments innovation (gpi) service that is tied to speeding and streamlining cross-border payments. The bank joins 160 financial institution (FI) peers across 200 countries, reported The Star Online.

Maybank said the cross-border remittances include same-day overseas fund transfers to beneficiary accounts at participating banks across the SWIFT gpi platform. The transactions are defined as those received within the banks’ cut-off time “and where credit confirmation has been received,” reported the site.

Jerome Hon, group chief operations officer at the bank, said the embrace of gpi means that “customers, especially corporates handling large amounts of remittances regularly, will benefit from the reduced crediting time, with faster access to funds remitted to them or their beneficiaries. In addition, Maybank is able to initiate stop payment instructions via the SWIFT gpi tracker.”

The news comes the same week that SWIFT said it is expanding its network-wide payments validation toolkit, announcing that it would offer a new “in-flight” cloud-based payment investigation and resolution service.

As noted in this space last week, via a press release, SWIFT said the new feature allows for dynamic query-handling between banks on the SWIFT network.

Banks can quickly resolve instances where operational, regulator or compliance information is incorrect, or missing from the payment instructions, SWIFT said. The company added that the tool complements its gpi pre-validation service, which identifies and eliminates errors and omissions in the payment messages before the payments are initiated. The feature is integrated directly into the SWIFT gpi, and will, ultimately, be made available to all of the 10,000 banks in the SWIFT network, the company said.

SWIFT noted that, in the first stage of the rollout, the service will be piloted by 12 major banks and three case management software providers. SWIFT said it’s slated to go live in November of this year.