At Ripple’s annual Swell event on Oct. 1, Spanish financial services firm Banco Santander executives shared their experience of using blockchain-powered payment systems powered by the former’s RippleNet product.

In April 2018, Santander launched the One Pay FX–building on RippleNet–for commercial usage and enabling mobile cross-border payments. Ed Metzger, the bank’s Head of Innovation, led the note stating the technology helped “improve our customers’ lives.”

Deploying Ripple’s technology was no easy feat for the humungous bank, shared Metzger. Banco Santander is active in ten financial centers, is the largest financial institution in Europe, and boasts of over 140 million customers worldwide, who were all introduced to the application. The implications of failure would have been far-fetched.

However, Santander found out that retail customers were readily looking for a banking experience that was fast, simple, personal, and comparable to readily-used applications such as messaging platforms and social media apps. In addition, Piloting Ripple’s product across an array of markets provided customers with financial transparency, certainty, and speed.

Metzger noted:

“We believe that financial services are moving to a world of open platforms where companies collaborate to deliver excellent customer service for their customers, and that’s at the core of what we’re doing with One Pay FX.”

Giving the example of a customer using OnePay FX’s services, Metzger shared:

“One of our customers was in Italy on holiday and parked in the wrong place. He needed to pay a fine and didn’t have his banking card. He was able to use the app to immediately pay the fine, and stop his car from being towed away.”

The bank executive added Santander has plans to introduce the OnePay FX application in more markets shortly. At the time of writing, the Ripple-powered product is available in the U.K and provides on-demand international remittances Poland, Brazil, and Spain.

Metzger drew attention to the changing face of the financial market, expressing “early signs of much bigger changes” are being noticed. He exclaimed that blockchain technology allows people to not “plan ahead,” empowering everyone to “send an international payment when they need to.”

Update: Headline has removed “XRP” to avoid potential confusion.