Ripple and SWIFT CEOs Met in a Face-to-Face Debate in Paris at “Let’s Send the Money” Event

The cryptocurrency community has been waiting for a long period of time a face to face discussion between the CEO of Ripple, Brad Garlinghouse and the CEO fo SWIFT, Gottfried Leibbrandt. These two CEOs attended a panel called “Let’s Send the Money” at the Paris FinTech Forum 2019.

During this event, participants discussed how cross-border payments can be improved. Both companies work with financial institutions and other firms to process cross-border transactions between companies. At the moment, SWIFT is the most important company offering services to firms all over the world.

Nevertheless, using blockchain technology and the XRP digital asset, Ripple is also growing very fast.

The CEO of SWIFT explained how they will be playing an important role in the future of transaction. They will be working with the large client base they currently have trying to enhance the speed and process of the payments. About it, he commented:

“We have 10,000 banks in the network, and that, I think, is a resilient system, correspondent banking, and the other reason is [that] we are innovating like crazy… The big innovation we introduced three years ago called GPI, Global Payments Innovation, which really takes correspondent banking into the 21st century…”

Brad Garlinhouse, mentioned that the Internet of Value will also be playing an important role in the future of payments. This is why Ripple is going to be a major player once the IoV permeates the world of finance. He explained that Ripple thinks about the industry in the next 10 or 20 years. They are trying to move money in the same way as information currently moves.

He then compared both companies, SWIFT and Ripple with Amazon and Walmart. Garlinghouse mentioned that the intention is to reduce costs dramatically, increase speed and democratize payments. He went on saying that the future Ripple sees is one of many networks that are interoperable and that reduce the friction of payments to close to zero.

During the debate, Leibbrandt received a question on why not to work with Ripple directly. The CEO of SWIFT explained that they’ve had a long discussion about this and that they’ve tried blockchain out with a big Proof-of-Concept.

He emphasized that 40 banks participated in it and that it was the largest HyperLedger implementation outside IBM. However, when they’ve seen the results, banks were not sure about it. They believe that it is not much better than what it currently is and that the migration costs are very high to be implemented. This, it is much easier to integrate with APIs rather than with Blockchain technology.

Garlinghouse answered back saying that transactions using blockchain technology and XRP technology are processed almost immediately. He explained that SWIFT is a one-way messaging framework and that it isn’t actually a liquidity provider.

He explained that although virtual currencies are volatile in the long term, in the short term they can be really helpful without being exposed to high volatile. Furthermore, Garlinghouse said that it is better to use a volatile asset for a short time transaction rather than a low volatility asset for a long amount of time, something that SWIFT does.

After this event, the XRP digital currency skyrocketed 12% in just a few hours. Now, the second largest coin after Bitcoin (BTC) is being traded around $0.317 and it has a market capitalization of $13.05 billion.