PNC Bank, the 9th largest bank in the United States by assets, has joined Ripple’s enterprise blockchain network RippleNet.

Ripple is among the most well known startups that builds blockchain technology, or the software that first emerged as the system underpinning cryptocurrencies.

With more $380.7 billions in funds, PNC boasts more than 8 million customers including consumers, small businesses and large corporate and has retail branches in 19 states with 2,459 branches and 9,051 ATMs.

PNC bank now has clients in 40 countries across six different continents, having opened new payment corridors to parts of East and Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe and South America.

This development has made PNC a part of the clique of more than a 100 strong financial institutions including including Banco Santander and American Express that are already using technology by RippleNet to provide global payment experience to thousands of people every day.

Ripple said in its announcement:

Ripple’s technology will have an immediate impact on each of those groups, enabling PNC’s commercial clients to receive payments from overseas banks in real time.

The bank will be using xCurrent, a software solution product of RippleNet that enables banks to instantly settle cross-border payments with end-to-end tracking. Using xCurrent, banks message each other in real-time to confirm payment details prior to initiating the transaction and to confirm delivery once it settles.

Other RippleNet product, like xRapid, which is set to go live in coming days, has found much less adopters than xCurrent partially because xRapid uses XRP for real-time liquidity. Although RippleNet claims that it dramatically lowers costs while enabling real-time payments in emerging markets but only 2 large companies are testing it currently, Western Union and MoneyGram. Their response to xRapid could be a factor for bullish run of XRP but no solid decisions have been made yet.

Over the past few years banks have been piling their investments in distributed ledgers in the hopes that it can help them shorten the exhaustively complex and lengthy transaction processes. Distributed ledger, a consensus of replicated and synchronized digital data geographically spread across multiple sites or countries has no central administrator or centralized data storage. This concept, which is followed by Blockchain, has been deployed in a few banks but the work to change that is still undergoing.

If XRP is adopted by institutions, we could see alot faster banking experience as Ripple claims that the transaction rate per sec for XRP is far greater than any of the other currencies.

Regardless of what is happening in the financial markets right now, the next step of Ripple is definitely to promote the adoption of XRP and XRP-based products.