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The third largest bank in Saudia Arabia says it’s Ripple-powered instant cross-border payment pilot is now live.

The Saudi British Bank (SABB) says it’s one of three banks with the go-ahead from the country’s central bank to test Ripple’s technology. According to the company’s head of global liquidity and cash management Ghada Al Jarbou, SABB is pushing to offer its customers instant international payments as soon as possible.

“Saudi Arabia is one of the largest remittances markets in the world, so a key focus is improving cross-border payments, making them cheaper and faster for our corporate clients.

While the central bank is working on domestic instant payments offerings and investigating the possibility of real-time cross-border transactions with the UAE using a cryptocurrency, we are keen to offer instant payments on a global scale as soon as possible. We have just gone live end of December 2018.”

Ripple’s global head of infrastructure innovation Dilip Rao says Ripple is rapidly expanding its presence in the Middle East, and has targeted the region as a primary place for the early adoption of blockchain-based payment solutions.

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“We have to date signed up close to 200 financial institutions around the world, many of them from this part of the world…

We now have three banks in Saudi Arabia, two in Kuwait, one in Bahrain, one in Oman, a couple in the UAE. And it really is our fastest growing marketplace.”

So far, SABB has not clarified whether it plans to utilize Ripple’s blockchain-based payment solution xCurrent or XRP-powered payment product xRapid.