Back to the list

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse claims 6% of SWIFT transactions require human intervention

ambcrypto.com 19 May 2019 14:30, UTC

Amid reports of Ripple allegedly misrepresenting the actual amount of XRP in their escrow accounts, the US-based blockchain tech firm continues to be one of the fastest growing networks in the world. Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse, during a recent session at the Swiss National Bank Conference, claimed that around six percent of SWIFT transactions required human intervention.

He further explained that this, in turn, would add “time and cost” and pointed out that “cost” did not only imply the fees associated with the transactions, but also the “pre-funding” or the cost of capital required for commercial banks which adds up to the drawbacks of the existing legacy financial system.

Garlinghouse said that the current cross-border payment scenario is riddled with issues such as high cost and slow process time. He added that often these “pre-funding” costs were “borne and burdened” by the people who are least able to afford them. He further cited,

“.. instead you can use a digital asset to have global liquidity on demand now we build upon a tech stack of an open-source technology called XRP”

Taking the opportunity, he praised Ripple’s native digital coin and stated that XRP was cheaper and faster on a “per transaction basis” than Bitcoin [BTC] by a “thousand times”.

According to Garlinghouse, global payments today “have not caught up with the age of the Internet”. He also said that Blockchain technology had the ability to change the existing payment settlement dynamic by removing the need for a “central counterparty” because of its unique ability to “transact without the need for trust”.

Speaking on the subject of interoperability, Garlinghouse termed it an important factor while scaling the cross-border remittance issue. He stated:

“We’re trying to solve a problem, selling technologies to banks and financial institutions to solve a cross-border payments problem.”

The CEO clarified that the company has not focused on the Central Bank Digital Currency [CBDC] issuance and emphasized on the need for interoperability globally. Garlinghouse argued that “even in a world of CBBC’s”, interoperability was needed in order to solve the cross-border transaction dealings issue.

Garlinghouse had earlier dismissed JP Morgan’s in-house stablecoin dubbed “JPM Coin” stating “lack of interoperability” as the reason.

ambcrypto.com