XRP price loses over 5% despite some positive news: SBI Ripple Asia and SBI Remit collaborate to launch a new remittance service which will operate using RippleNet.
XRP falls by 5.31% to hit $0.25 indicating weakness and trading apathy, even when Ripple Labs Inc has added another feather to its cap by adding a new remittance service on RippleNet. SBI Ripple Asia and SBI Remit, which is a financial services company in Japan, are set to introduce a new remittance that will enable customers to transfer money between Japan and Vietnam.
The new service is set to operate using RippleNet, and the Vietnamese baking giant TP Bank (Tien Phong Commercial Joint Stock Bank) is also a partner in the new arrangement. In a press release, SBI Remit and SBI Ripple announced that the partnership will enable customers to be able to send money in realtime at the lowest cost.
The press release further stated that the service will fill a pressing need for remittance services between Vietnam and Japan as:
“….the population of Vietnamese residents in Japan has grown 4.57 times over the past five years to 330,835 (as of the end of December 2018), and the number is expected to further increase in the future. SBI Remit provides safe and convenient services for these Vietnamese customers in Japan.”
Whi this further deepens the ties that bind XRP to the global financial services sector, this also indicates that XRP’s usage and popularity is tending towards other markets apart from the United States and Europe (Asia to be precise).
This then means that XRP and RippleNet are filling niche demands which other remittance services have so far failed to fill due to higher transaction costs, technology inefficiencies, poor infrastructural redundancies to name a few. It also shows that Ripples’ Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm (RPCA) works as a type of Distributed Ledger Technolgy (DLT) indicating that there is so much more on the other side of the fence for the cryptospace in general as per innovation.
The CEO of SBI Holdings Yoshitaka Kitao said:
“The booming Vietnamese economy is one of the most attractive markets around the world. TPBank, which the SBI Group has invested in, in 2009 and owns a 19.9% share of, has achieved steady accumulation of loans and non-interest income such as settlement services, by actively utilizing cutting-edge technologies.
The adoption of RippleNet will further differentiate the company from its competitors. We will also develop remittance services that incorporates crypto-assets in the future.”
Nguyen Hung, CEO of TP Bank also noted:
“Our cooperation with SBI Ripple Asia Co., Ltd on the application of blockchain technology in cross border money transfers marks an important turning point in enhancing our customer experience and makes international money transfers via TPBank faster, more convenient and safer than ever before.”
While this may seem like a marriage made in heaven, time will tell if this arrangement is either a foolhardy adventure or an Avante-Garde way for the cryptospace to move towards adoption. Either way, it solves problems on the ground and fulfills the first rule of business.
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