This alliance aims to explore the utility of xCurrent to immediately settle the payments that enter and leave the country, guaranteeing greater transparency and minimizing costs for banking operations.
The service company Blockchain, Ripple, finally reached a commercial agreement with the Central Bank of Saudi Arabia to carry out a pilot program that will allow the banks of the country to test the underlying technology of the digital currencies.
This pilot test with the Monetary Authority of Saudi Arabia accredits him as the second central bank of a nation to work with Ripple, since the first institution of its kind was the Bank of England, which had established an agreement with the service company Blockchain last year.
The announcement of the agreement recently established by Ripple was made earlier this week, when the CEO of the company, Brad Garlinghouse, commented at the Blockchain Connect conference - held in the city of San Francisco - the following:
"This innovative pilot program is the first of its kind to be launched by a central bank. The participating institutions [of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia] will use xCurrent to instantly settle inbound and outbound payments in the country, ensuring greater transparency and lower costs. "
Although this is an important step for Ripple, the fact that banks in Saudi Arabia show interest in testing with xCurrent is not so surprising, precisely because of the growing interest shown in the product by other renowned financial institutions. Just earlier this month, Grupo Santander announced that it is in the process of implementing a mobile payment application that makes use of xCurrent's technology to carry out transactions and instant payments, having Spain, Brazil, Poland and the United Kingdom as The first group of countries to test the product.
Recently UAE Exchange, a leading company operating in the United Arab Emirates, announced that it would soon be testing with RippleNet to process and manage international payments.
Another company that apparently has also shown great interest in the products developed by Ripple is Western Union, as recent reports claim that it is testing the technology of the service company Blockchain. This was confirmed by the Fortune news agency, which interviewed a spokesperson who confirmed that the company is testing for payments using XRP balances.
In an interview with the Bloomberg news agency, Western Union general manager Hikmet Ersen said:
"We are looking to work especially in the area of processing settlement and in the optimization of working capital, also in the part of regulation making use of the potential of Blockchain technology ... We are doing tests, we already have some projects with Ripple".
Originally Ripple had announced in 2015 that it was working with Western Union, but the remittance company did not comment at that time.