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The head of global banking at Bank of America is shedding new light on the company’s relationship with Ripple.
In the latest Treasury Insights podcast, BofA’s Julie Harris affirms the banking giant’s partnership with Ripple, the details of which have been shrouded in mystery for years.
When discussing what will happen in the world of banking over the next decade, Harris says BofA’s first goal is to ensure its clients can get things done anywhere, anytime. Its second is to ensure it can integrate new solutions and keep pace with the rapid change in the world of fintech.
“Client experience, and that combination of the high touch and high tech ,is really important in a big area of focus for us. So not just the capability but the actual experience and ability to get things done anytime, anywhere because we are an around-the-clock society.
And the second [goal] is the ability to integrate. And Derrick touched on this a lot. It’s not about our platform and our capabilities. It’s about you as a client and the infrastructure you have and the ability for us to integrate, whether that’s with platforms and capabilities that we built or partnerships that we have with the likes of Ripple or Swift. These are fintechs that we’re partnering with. They’ve come through all of our rigor of legal and compliance, and we’re able to leverage our banking as a platform to deliver that to you.”
In the past, officials at BofA have been hesitant to acknowledge whether the company has an ongoing partnership with Ripple.
Back in 2016, the two companies worked on a pilot together. A job opening at BofA related to the project was posted on LinkedIn, stating that the company was looking to hire a treasury product manager to lead the “product management team for the Ripple Project, a decentralized ledger technology based solution to cross border payments marketed to GTS [global transaction services] clients.” Details on the outcome of the pilot, or whether it utilized the crypto asset XRP, have never been released.
Bank of America also joined a pilot at Swift last year to test a new service designed to give companies a way to track their payments from a single source. The pilot was deemed a success and included a total of 22 companies including JP Morgan, GE and Standard Chartered.