Brad Galringhouse, the CEO of Ripple, explained that he xCurrent service is an upgrade to SWIFT. He said that at a meeting with representatives of banks and financial institutions. SWIFT is the most popular system for cross-border transfers around the world and it is currently being used by most of the companies around the world that process international transfers.
Ripple’s xCurrent is An Upgraded SWIFT
Ripple is working in order to reduce the costs of cross-border payments that are processed by financial institutions around the world. SIWFT transactions take several days to be processed and it is more expensive than doing so through xCurrent or with the xRapid service, that uses the XRP digital asset.
At the moment, SWIFT is the dominant cross-border messaging system that is being used by banks and many other financial institutions around the globe. Nonetheless, Mr. Garlinghouse explained that the industry still needs to catch up and that xCurrent is an upgraded SWIFT system.
He explained that xCurrent is SWIFT 2.0 that is much more efficient and more real-time in a fiat to fiat basis. The event in which they were discussing these issues was related to central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and how central banks were going to be dealing with them in the future.
According to the Twitter user XRP Research Center, some of the key attendees included Agustin Carstens, BIS Chairman, Christine Lagarde, IMF Chairwoman, Tobias Adrian, IMF Director, Ahmed Abdulkarim, SAMA Governor and many others.
Garlinghouse has also been present as the only participant from the private sector, since the rest of the participants were high executives of different central banks and monetary authorities from different countries.
At the moment, Ripple’s services are targetting private companies rather than central banks. They are dealing with commercial banks and other financial institutions. He has also compared XRP to Bitcoin (BTC), the largest digital currency in the space. Garlinghouse said that XRP was created in order to correct the main deficiencies that can be found on Bitcoin. The most popular virtual currency is currently very slow and it is having issues with its scalability.
At the time of writing this article, XRP is the third largest digital asset. According to CoinMarketCap, the virtual currency has a market valuation of $17.36 billion and a price per coin of $0.41.
