“One of the initiatives is to use Bitex as a strategic partner to provide our overseas customers with payment and collection services at the Bitex Exchange.”

SWIFT is a money transfer service, one with such a huge scope, it is causing trouble for cryptocurrencies that wish to break into the money transfer and cross-border payments market. Services such as Ripple believe they are the future for services such as SWIFT, however, until Ripple can give people a reason to stop using SWIFT, it seems that the traditional FIAT transfer system will continue to rule. According to new reports out this week, a bank in Argentina has started to use Bitcoin as an alternative method for cross-border money transfer, over SWIFT, the service used previously. Banco Masventas are an Argentina based banking company, though they are by no means the biggest in Argentina or South America, this move towards cryptocurrencies, namely Bitcoin is very significant indeed. The transfers have used Bitex in order to facilitate the payments, this in turn has allowed customers of Banco Masventas to transfer money in Bitcoin. What are the benefits to this? Well as we know, cryptocurrencies can increase transaction times and can of course hold reduced transaction fees due to differing exchange rates etc. Overall though, Bitcoin is notoriously not the fastest nor the cheapest currency to use, therefore it’s quite interesting that Banco Masventas have gone down this route. According to José Humerbto Dakak, a shareholder of Banco Masventas:Clearly, Banco Masventas recognise that cryptocurrency can have great implications for international money transfer services and solutions. Overall it does seem that with this move, Banco Masventas aim to improve their service to their customers, but also intend to really begin to explore the inherent advantages of blockchain technologies. As I have mentioned, Bitcoin is an interesting choice for this service, although I believe this is simply down to a combination of Bitcoins popularity and of course, a limit to the services provided by Bitex. As a result of this, we might expect the likes of Ripple to start to gain some enhanced attention within Argentina, by both Banco Masventas and other financial service providers, assuming this new system integrating Bitex works well. This is an exciting step towards cryptocurrency adoption and will provide a wealth of customers new opportunities to use Bitcoin, in a practical way, through this, more investment opportunities will appear and overall, the popularity of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in Argentina may spike.