Santander’s OnePay FX mobile app, the first mobile app designed for international payments powered by blockchain technology, is gaining momentum. According to Santander Group;

Millions of Santander customers in Europe use the app as an avenue for same-day, cross-border payments.

This technological development in Fintech is a crucial improvement, reducing the time taken to send and receive international funds from three to five days to seconds.

In the world of cross-border payments, such a seamless digital experience isn’t easy. However, the success of the OnePay FX app is mainly due to the fluid, easy customer experience for mobile users powered by Ripple via xCurrent. The demand for OnePay FX is expected to grow as more mobile users demand efficient funds transfer avenues through Fintech services.

Santander has rolled out OnePay FX to the Eurozone and the United States so far. Santander’s Executive Chair, Ana Botin, said;

50% of the bank’s annual international money transfers were being carried out by the Ripple powered blockchain.

This implementation makes Santander the first international bank to perform cross-border payments by leveraging blockchain technology.

Through their mobile app, Santander offers remittance customers a wide range of features such as the total cost of sending the payment inclusive of bank charges and foreign exchange rates, a quote on the estimated time of delivery for improved transparency, and a receipt of the payments. Santander has expressed plans to roll out OnePay FX services to an additional two dozen more countries around the world in the future, to increase the utility of the app and add value to their customers.

Perhaps this could be the reason why Ripple’s CEO, Brad Garlinghouse, was adamant that Bitcoin’s dominance on the cryptocurrency market would soon end, as the network paves the way for cryptocurrencies that are independently correlated to Bitcoin prices. Garlinghouse was also quoted saying that Ripple had acquired 20+ contracts with financial institutions during the first quarter of 2018. This number sums up to an average of 1.5 new contracts signed by Ripple every week, keeping with the pace that will see Ripple sign 80 contracts by the end of 2018.

In the meantime, Ripple has released its updated version 1.0.0. This release improves on several features that had been implemented in previous versions. The updated version marks around six years of development on the ledgers, which will continue to use the same semantic versioning feature used to organize and track future updates by Ripple.

Ripple version 1.0.0 symbolize the growing maturity of the software and the stable increase in the stability of the decentralized network of nodes that run the Ripple software around the world. The last date for all nodes on the Ripple network to update to the new software version is June 14th, failure to which will result in the node being blocked from the servers by “Amendment.”

This new milestone marks a new development towards the increased function of the XRP ledger, which will one day be recognized as the most valuable and transformative software in the blockchain space.