Spanish Banking Giant Santander to Bring Ripple’s Payments Solution to Mexico

According to a report published by The Block, on March 30, 2020, Spanish banking titan, Santander, is all set to bring its Ripple-enabled payment solution to Mexico later this year.

Ripple Looking to Tap the Mexican Remittance Market

San Francisco-based distributed ledger technology (DLT) firm, Ripple Inc. recently announced that it would be bringing its blockchain-powered international remittance platform dubbed RippleNet to Mexico to tap the country’s significant remittance market.

In a Form 20-F filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) earlier in March 2020, Santander stated that its DLT-enabled solution – One Pay FX – will mark its debut in Mexico early this year.

For the uninitiated, Ripple initially launched One Pay FX in 2018 as a money transfer solution to leverage the firm’s enterprise-geared cross-border payment solution RippleNet. The newly launched solution will act as a layer solution to enable RippleNet to settle cross-border transactions.

Adding to the announcement, the Spanish bank said that the DLT-powered solution offers transparency, competitive cost, and better speed. These features will largely uplift the customer experience, the bank noted.

Per the pertinent Form 20-F, Ripple’s One Pay FX payments solution is currently available to customers in six countries, namely, Spain, the U.K., Brazil, Poland, Portugal, and Chile. The bank has also previously made it clear that the solution will soon be launched in all of its markets the world over.

As for the financials of Ripple, it is backed by Santander bank’s capital arm InnoVentures which, in 2015, invested close to $4 million in Ripple’s $32 million series A funding round.

Santander High on Ripple’s Potential

Cross-border payments space has continually been touted as one of the areas that could benefit greatly from the benefits of blockchain technology. As reported by BTCManager on July 15, 2019, Santander had tapped Ripple’s technology to establish a new RippleNet-based payment corridor between the U.K. and Poland free of charge through its Pay FX digital banking app.

On a more recent note, BTCManager informed its audience in October 2019, how Santander had launched a $20 million bond on the blockchain and had partnered with the Madrid City Council to develop DLT-powered applications that will enable citizens to pay transport fare from a unified platform.