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Banks using Ripple’s xCurrent technology are now looking to upgrade to the company’s XRP-powered xRapid, according to Ripple’s senior vice president of product management Asheesh Birla.

Birla says a number of banks are seriously considering taking the plunge into crypto and using xRapid to process cross-border payments.

“xRapid is seeing greater traction among payment providers, including Currencies Direct, Mercury FX and Viamericas, whereas the banks are not quite ready to take the plunge into the nascent cryptocurrency space. However, Mr Birla reports that some banks using xCurrent are now looking to use xRapid for the second phase of their projects…

Mr Birla says that Ripple developed its technology with scalability in mind. ‘To deploy something for Standard Chartered, Santander or Bank of America, our solution needs to scale to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second – this was in the design from the outset,’ he says.”

Birla made the comments to the financial outlet The Banker, which interviewed Birla in collaboration with Deutsche Bank in July. The interview recently caught fire on Twitter.

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Ripple’s xRapid is designed to utilize XRP to power instant cross-border transactions between financial institutions. Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen recently offered a thorough description on how the technology works.

“xRapid, that’s a component of RippleNet. That allows payment providers to lower the cost and liquidity for their global payments. So it allows, for example, a bank that’s trying to send money to Mexico to use XRP as the intermediate currency. They don’t necessarily have to hold XRP, but it’s used to make things very efficient.

So in this example, a customer’s going to a remittance company in the US. Those dollars are now exchanged into XRP through Bittrex, which is a great exchange. It’s immediately settled in XRP in seconds. Bitso, an exchange, then provides the exchange between XRP and Mexican peso that can now be delivered to a Mexican bank, which, because they have a real-time system in Mexico, allows that to go into the customer’s account very quickly.

This now allows payment providers, banks and their customers to move value in one to two minutes versus days, or a process that might mask those days but have to charge for the settlement risk and costs.”

You can check out the full interview with Asheesh Birla here.

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