National Bank of Egypt Taps Ripple’s DLT for Cross-Border Payments

National Bank of Egypt (NBE), the country’s oldest and largest bank in terms of assets, has inked a strategic partnership deal with Ripple, the San Francisco-based blockchain project in charge of XRP. The deal will enable NBE to tap Ripple’s blockchain technology for cross-border payments and remittances, according to reports on February 12, 2020.

NBE Joins RippleNet

In a bid to facilitate superfast and cost-efficient cross-border payments and remittances, Egypt’s oldest lender, the National Bank of Egypt (NBE) has joined RippleNet, Ripple’s distributed ledger technology (DLT) powered payments network.

RippleNet currently boasts more than 300 banks and financial institutions from across the globe, and NBE claims its partnership with Ripple has now put its name in the history books as the first Egyptian bank to join the blockchain bandwagon.

Per the recent statistics released by the World Bank, remittance to low-and-middle-income nations is expected to hit a massive $597 billion by 2021, and Egypt maintains its position among the top five remittance recipient nations in the world.

Ripple Gaining Traction

Though the NBE is yet to state whether it will adopt RippleNet’s On-Demand Liquidity solution which is powered by XRP, however, the fact remains that this latest addition to the Ripple family represents a significant feat for the blockchain firm.

Commenting on the exciting development, Dalia El-Baz, the Chairman of the National bank of Egypt reiterated that he firmly believes that RippleNet will continue to move in an upward trajectory and significantly boost Ripple’s earnings.

The NBE also expects its latest blockchain adoption to enable it to greatly increase its customer base, while also allowing it to offer its users highly secure services in compliance with international insurance standards.

Despite being bashed by critics for being overly centralized, Ripple has continued to succeed in its blockchain businesses, inking several significant partnership deals with top players in the financial world and CEO Brad Garlinghouse says Ripple may go public via an IPO this year.

While most XRP holders may not be very impressed with the altcoin’s performance so far, 2020 may just be the year for an XRP moonshot, as Ripple’s top partner SBI Holdings has announced that it may pay customers dividends in XRP.

At press time, the price of XRP is up by 9.26 percent on the 24-hour timeframe, trading at $0.297981, as seen on CoinMarketCap.