The Thai bank, Siam Commercial Bank (SCB) has revealed that it has made a cross-border payments transfer using Ripple’s technology, a development that highlights how efficient the technology is, as it drastically reduced the transactions time from a long two days to just one minute.

According to the official announcement:

“In a bid to optimize operational efficiency, SCB and PTTEP have collaborated since mid-2018 on a research and development effort to adopt Blockchain technology for cross-border B2B payment. Earlier this year, the project was able to make pilot payments on Blockchain, with payments reaching destinations within one minute, compared to one to two days with conventional methods.”

Even though the bank didn’t specifically mention Ripple, it has been documented that the SCB is working with Ripple’s tech to adopt faster cross-border payments.

The bank and the PPT Exploration and Production Public Limited signed a cooperation agreement in 2018 which has the main aim on the creation of a cross-border payments system that would support PTTEP’s B2B fund transfers between partners and service providers. The Senior Vice President Chief Executive Officer of Commercial Banking Solutions, Phimonpha Santichok has said that “SCB has invested in Ripple, which is a major global enterprise blockchain solution.”

Ripple released its own blog post about the involvement of SCB, saying that it would be the first of its many financial to use the multi-hop feature.

“Siam Commercial Bank (SCB) will be the first financial institution on RippleNet to pioneer a key feature called “multi-hop”, which allows them to settle frictionless payments on behalf of other financial institutions on the network. This eliminates the need for a direct one-to-one connection (or bilateral relationship) between financial institutions to settle a payment. Using multi-hop, SCB will be able to receive and forward on a payment without a bilateral relationship between the originator and beneficiary institutions.”

Price

In terms of price, Ripple isn’t performing as well as you’d hope, as is the rest of the market. At the time of writing, XRP is priced at $0.29 following a 8.74 percent loss in value over the past 24 hours.