Ripple: The Oldest Thai Bank Reduced Cross-Border Transaction Time From 2 Days To 1 Minute Using Ripple Tech

Thai bank, Siam Commercial Bank (SCB), has revealed that it has made a cross-border payments transfer using Ripple’s technology, a development that highlights the efficiency of the technology, as it drastically reduced the transaction time from 2 days to 1 minute.

The official announcement reads,

In a bid to optimize operational efficiency, SCB and PTTEP have collaborated since mid-2018 on a research and development effort to adopt Blockchain technology for cross-border B2B payment.  Earlier this year, the project was able to make pilot payments on Blockchain, with payments reaching destinations within one minute, compared to one to two days with conventional methods.

Although Ripple was not mentioned by name here, it has been documented that the SCB is working with Ripple’s tech to foster faster cross border payments.

SCB and the PPT Exploration and Production Public Company Limited (PTTEP) signed a cooperation agreement last year that focused on the creation of a cross-border payments system that would support PTTEP’s B2B funds transfers between partners and service providers. Phimonpha Santichok, Senior Vice President Chief Executive Officer of Commercial Banking Solutions, said at the time that “SCB has invested in Ripple, which is a major global enterprise blockchain solution.”

Ripple released its own blog post about the involvement of SCB, saying that it would be the first of its many financial partners to use the “multi-hop” feature,

Siam Commercial Bank (SCB) will be the first financial institution on RippleNet to pioneer a key feature called “multi-hop”, which allows them to settle frictionless payments on behalf of other financial institutions on the network. This eliminates the need for a direct one-to-one connection (or bilateral relationship) between financial institutions to settle a payment. Using multi-hop, SCB will be able to receive and forward on a payment without a bilateral relationship between the originator and beneficiary institutions.