Santander Adds New Regions To Payments App In Collaboration With Ripple
- Built by Santander and Ripple, the One Pay FX international payments app is now available in 19 additional regions.
- The bank also enhanced its Ripple-powered payments system to allow instant transactions.
Santander bank office in Madrid, Spain on April 27, 2019. Manuel Esteban/Shutterstock
International payments app One Pay FX, which was built in collaboration between banking giant Banco Santander and Ripple, has expanded its reach to 19 additional regions, Ripple said in a press release on 9 July.
According to the announcement, Banco Santander not only added 19 available regions for its international payments app, but has also enhanced its Ripple-powered payments system to allow “some payments” to happen instantly. Originally launched in the UK, Poland, Brazil and Spain, the international payments app is now available in countries such as U.S., Chile and Portugal.
One Pay FX’s CTO, Ed Metzger, said in a statement:
“We want to be at the forefront of the merging of finance and technology, but our innovation is always customer led. Customers told us that the international payments process could be better so we partnered with Ripple to explore how blockchain could make transactions faster, cheaper and more transparent.”
Metzger further noted that Santander was frequently receiving customer feedback about the lack of clarity and transparency in the traditional process, which presented the bank with an opportunity to innovate. As a result, the bank collaborated with Ripple and built an app that acted as a borderless blockchain-based payment channel called One Pay FX, which it launched in 2018.
Metzger further said:
“Ripple helps us directly address the issues raised by our customers. Whether they are putting down a deposit on a holiday rental or paying a foreign supplier, they see exactly how much will arrive when they’re making the payment and have certainty about when it will get there. Ripple also helps us address the speed issue of international transactions.”
The banking giant has been bullish on blockchain technology for a while now. Back in 2015, Santander’s InnoVentures fund invested $4 million into Ripple’s Series A funding round, which raised around $32 million. Earlier this year, Santander also became the first organization to use a public blockchain to manage every part of a bond task, thus fully digitizing it.
- A federal judge ruled that the sale of XRP through exchanges and algorithms did not qualify as selling securities, which could have a major impact on several SEC lawsuits.
- The institutional sale of the token, however, did violate federal securities laws, and the lawsuit between the SEC and Ripple will have to go to trial.
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- These documents are seen as central in Ripple’s battle against the SEC, which in 2020 accused the company of selling its XRP token without registering it as a security.
- The documents in question are internal emails, text messages, and expert reports that followed Hinman’s 2018 speech, in which he said ETH and BTC were not securities.
- The exchange argues that the SEC failed to provide a “fair notice” that selling XRP was illegal, and that it previously made public statements that those transactions were lawful.
- Coinbase also pointed out that the SEC is yet to provide clear guidance to crypto businesses, and that it keeps being inconsistent about its enforcement approach.