Thai Bank Walks Back On Ripple XRP Plans

Thailand’s Siam Commercial Bank won’t be using Ripple’s XRP technology despite earlier announcements of such plans.

According to reports in BlockTribune on Monday (June 10), Siam Commercial Bank (SCB) retracted a previous statement that it was planning to integrate use of Ripple’s XRP token to power cross-border B2B payments. The financial institution announced in April a collaboration with PPT Exploration and Production Public Company Limited (PTTEP).

Their initiative would deploy the XRP digital token to power cross-border B2B payments for PTTEP, which SCB said would result in “payments [reaching] destinations within one minute, compared to one-to-two days with conventional methods.”

At the time, SCB said it was the first bank to use Ripple technology in a B2B payments format.

Earlier this month, SCB responded to a Twitter question with the reply that the bank’s “XRP system will be announced soon,” a statement subsequently retracted several days later.

“We are so sorry for the previous information of the previous post,” the bank said on its official Twitter handle. “As of now, we have no plan on using XRP.”

It’s unclear whether the bank’s partnership with PTTEP will continue without the use of XRP.

In 2017 Siam Commercial Bank announced plans to use Ripple’s blockchain infrastructure to power cross-border remittances between Thailand and Japan in another collaboration with Japan’s SBI Remit.

“SCB invests in innovative technology, like Ripple, to provide our retail customers with the financial products and services they increasingly need in this digital age,” SCB chief strategy officer Dr. Arak Sutivong said in a statement at the time. “Customers increasingly expect payments to work in real time, whether domestic or international.”

Late last year a lawsuit against Ripple and affiliates was elevated to federal court after a class action was filed accusing the company of fraud in raising hundreds of millions of dollars through unregistered XRP coins.