A major thriving country for Ripple blockchain technology, India, is being eyed by its ardent competitor, SWIFT, as the age-long firm declared a plan to test run its instant remittance tool with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) India.

According to a report by MoneyControl.com, the bank owned payment giant will be testing its GPI cross-border remittance solution with local networks in India.

The CEO and Regional Head of SWIFT in India and South Asia, Kiran Shetty, branded the latest development as an attempt to enhance speed, traceability, end-to-end transparency in India’s remittance industry.

Beyond member banks, the new ‘gpi instant’ platform is designed to also connect domestic non-gpi banks.

“So, we are trying to integrate with local switches to complete the last leg of the transaction,” Shetty stated.

This came after SWIFT successfully tested the new service with Fast & Secure Transfers (FAST) in Singapore and New Payments Platform (NPP) in Australia.

After successfully piloting the new tool in both countries, the CEO confirmed that settlement was completely executed in 25 seconds, and this was done between 17 banks across 7 countries.

“We are now looking to move into other real-time markets like India. We want to make sure that the value is derived at every level,” Shetty added.

Even though the testing is yet to begin in India, the State Bank of India and 10 other banks in the country have adopted the new solution from SWIFT, and they are looking forward to connecting with the cross-border payments network.

SWIFT added that its super-fast, traceable and transparent ‘gpi instant’ network will be available for use globally by the end of the year.

SWIFT Challenging Ripple In India And Beyond

Ripple, an offshoot of Distributed Ledger Technology, came into existence with the aim of solving SWIFT’s loopholes offered by its tagged archaic services.

Ripple undoubtedly proof to the world that it is the new age remittance solution, SWIFT has lately been trying to beef up its services with innovations purposely to reclaim its market share taken by Ripple.

Recently, Ripple and its token XRP were tipped of getting mass adoption in India subsequent to a report which claimed all banks in India are opting for Ripple’s latest decentralized remittance tool, xCurrent 4.0, with inbuilt xRapid, a tool that leverages XRP token for settling transactions.

This came amid the roaring info that India is looking to ban all f0rms of cryptocurrency activities in the country.

If crypto is finally banned in India, XRP token will definitely fall under the possible crypto embargo in the country. This means banks in the country will have no choice than to either use xCurrent without making use of xRapid, or opt for SWIFT gpi which offers almost the same service as xCurrent without the use of any crypto asset.

Previously while reporting the achievement of SWIFT gpi in year 2018, Today’s Gazette noted that the network saw massive adoption, moving from 15% to 56% within a year. It was also noted that SWIFT gpi accounted 50% of messaging traffic in the interbank networks.

Early this year, the managing director of Ripple (XRP) in South Asia and MENA, stated that even though Ripple is witnessing profound success lately in the remittance industry, it is far behind SWIFT gpi based on the number of banks the network possesses.

As at that time, around 60 leading banks and over 140 other financial institutions make use of SWIFT gpi.