Mumbai: Indians working in the Gulf will have a more efficient method for transferring money from bank accounts to India with UAE-based RAKBANK and several others joining Ripple’s network. Ripple, a currency network and a real-time gross settlement system ( RTGS ), enables instant money transfers by plugging banks into the RippleNet — the world’s first blockchain-based remittance system.

In India, Axis and Yes Bank have signed up with Ripple providing a landing point for all remittances to India. Dilip Rao, MD (Asia pacific and Middle East region), said that, at present, banks in the Gulf are able to provide immediate remittance service by entering into individual agreements with banks in India.

Banks have built host-to-host application programming interfaces (APIs). However, since these are bilateral connections, they have to set up hundreds of APIs , which leads to frequent failures. The other downside is that there is no immediate confirmation of the transaction’s success.

RippleNet’s advantage is that once the lenders plug into the network, their customers can send money to banks in any country, which is part of the network. Once the money is sent to the Indian partner, funds can be subsequently transferred to any bank immediately using local networks like the Immediate Payment Systems.

“We see an opportunity to globalise India Stack. For instance, it would be possible for banks to set up applications where customers can send money without account details by using Aadhaar as an identifier,” said Rao.

On Tuesday, Ripple announced that more than 100 financial institutions have joined the company’s network, to modernise global payments. The newest members of RippleNet include AirWallex, Bexs Banco, Credit Agricole, Cuallix, Currencies Direct, dLocal, IFX, Krungsri, RAKBANK and TransferGo , among others, and they’re now on the path to join existing members like SEB and Siam Commercial Bank, who have deployed Ripple solutions commercially.

Besides RAK Bank , UK-based payment providers IFX, TransferGo, and Currencies Direct will use RippleNet to power instant payments into India — the largest beneficiary of retail remittances worldwide at $71 billion annually.

According to Rao, Ripple can play a larger role in commercial remittances because of the two-way communication facility and the ability to carry messages in the system. Australia-based Airwallex will use RippleNet to process corporate payments at a highly competitive exchange rate, with low transaction fees, across the APAC region — through which 40% of cross-border payments are predicted to flow by 2025.

