Ripple has hired Marjan Delatinne to be its European sales director.

The appointment, announced Wednesday, is noteworthy because until recently Delatinne led customer engagement for Swift’s global payments innovation initiative, with which Ripple’s cross-border payment system competes.

Delatinne said her previous job had made her well aware of the Ripple offering and its evolution over the last two years.

“I found the business model very interesting — and the fact that Ripple as a fintech is adapting itself more and more to the bank environment, and trying to help the banks cope with the future requirements of the payments space,” she said.

Swift’s strength is its network of 11,000 banks that send messages about payments to one another and through correspondent banks where necessary. Its GPI is a cloud-based solution that lets members track the status of their Swift messages.

Ripple provides distributed-ledger technology that lets banks send international payments to one another in real time, without the need to go through correspondent banks.

“GPI could be a solution for a bank that wants to extend its investment in Swift, whereas what Ripple brings to the payment space — and its differentiator —is the fact that it goes beyond just messaging transportation," Delatinne said. "It’s providing the settlements of the transactions. So this creates a uniqueness that could be a solution of the future.”

Ripple this year is striving to get the banks that use its network to step up their volume, Delatinne said.

“It’s going to be a challenging year, and that’s one of the main reasons I joined Ripple — because I like a challenge,” she said.