A bank from Argentina called Banco Masventas has launched cross-border payment facilitated with the help of BTC. The feature is the result of a new partnership that emerged between the bank and a Latin-American exchange called Bitex. Bitex is a service provider that offers blockchain based financial solutions to individuals and businesses with the help of Bitcoin and 50 national currencies.

The bank is using Bitcoin payments as an alternative to SWIFT. So far this seems to be the first time that a regional bank used Bitcoin to facilitate cross-border payments. With the help of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology the bank can lower the cost and the duration of the service as well. This means customers now can use Bitex to send money to several countries worldwide whilst the process takes less than 24hours and the fee is only 3%+VAT according to the statement released. The system technically is the same as Ripple’s, the only difference is that instead of XRP it uses BTC.

The volatility is not an issue here, as the bank handles everything according to Jose Dakak, one of the main shareholders, while he also added:

“The customers will ask the bank to do an international payment, and the bank uses Bitex as a provider. For the customer, it’s transparent, they don’t touch, they don’t see the bitcoin. We are a provider for them, and they are not touching bitcoin.”