Today, at the Paris Fintech Forum, SWIFT CEO Gottfried Leibbrandt has said his firm’s integrating blockchain startup R3’s financial trade platform.
The CEO made known that SWIFT would deploy R3’s trade finance platform with its new payments standards framework GPI.
Leibbrandt at a parnel organized by CNBC on Wednesday said SWIFT’s announcing a proof-of-concept with R3 blockchain, a start-up referred to as Ripple’s number one competitor.
SWIFT’s CEO spoke beside the Chief Executive Officer of Ripple, Brad Garlinghouse, who said Ripple was opened to “ways we could work with Swift,” however, Garlinghouse made it clear that the two companies have not agreed to partner.
Swift’s respected financial messaging service is being used by top banks across the world, however, Ripple has vowed to show most of SWIFT’s customers the best way to perform an immediate seamless transaction.
Ripple’s CEO Tongue-lashes SWIFT’s Archaic Method, Calls System “One Way”
Although SWIFT has over 11,000 financial institutions to its side, and performs financial transactions worth $200 billion daily, however, the San Francisco-based blockchain firm Ripple is ready to take charge in the world of cross-border remittance with its state of the art tools deployed by central banks among other top banks.
According to Brad Garlinghouse, in the next five years, Ripple would have partnered with over half of the world’s top banks. This is no impossibility. The statement is driving close to reality.
Garlinghouse said “Decentralized systems I think over time are likely to win,” adding that, “I think that today that is not what SWIFT is.”
He said: “Swift today is a one-way messaging framework, it isn’t a liquidity provider.”
He conscientised on the importance of Internet of Value, saying it is a blend of “two-way messaging frameworks” that has real-time chatting procedures and real-time liquidity.
SWIFT and Ripple Are Now Linked
Although, many people are wondering why SWIFT decided to announced its partnership with R3 at a panel discussion featuring Ripple’s CEO.
The reasons behind this are many. Let’s note that Ripple is the first competitor to SWIFT, and the startup has been partnering with banks which have integrated SWIFT’s GPI.
Removing the above, may be SWIFT has forgotten that there is a link between R3 and Ripple. The already settled fight between Ripple and R3 has created a link between the two firms who were friends before the XRP dispute between the two firms surfaced.
The fight was settled by SBI Holding’s Yoshika Kitao, an investor in both Ripple and R3. Around May 2018, SBI Holdings, a group of over 40 financial firms pledged $107 million to R3. In the same line, it set aside 2 billion yen (around $17.9 million) to purchase R3 shares.
At the same time, R3 announced the launch of Corda Settler. The app made Ripple its first settlement mechanism. The decision by R3 to launch a settlement app purposely because of XRP is an outcome of SBI Holding’s advice to R3 to design and launch a project dependent on Ripple. This move brings R3’s Corda and XRP ecosystems “into closer alignment”.
Richard Gendal Brown, Chief Technology Officer at R3, said “the deployment of the Corda Settler and its support for XRP as the first settlement mechanism is an important step in showing how the powerful ecosystems cultivated by two of the of the world’s most influential crypto and blockchain communities can work together.”
“While the Settler will be open to all forms of crypto and traditional assets, this demonstration with XRP is the next logical step in showing how widespread acceptance and use of digital assets to transfer value and make payments can be achieved.”
Beyond that, Today’s Gazette published that SBI-R3 was created to favour XRP. The consortium is designed to improve the adoption of XRP.
With the relationship between Ripple, SBI, and R3 at the moment, and the latest partnership between the latter and SWIFT, there is no doubt that Ripple and SWIFT are linked in one way or another.
