Ripple will continue to focus on banking partnerships in 2016

Ripple (formerly Ripple Labs) is an emerging financial innovation company founded in San Francisco, USA. It aims to help small and medium-sized banks around the world to achieve instant cross-border transfers at low costs through its technology and network. Its services are mainly aimed at small and medium-sized banks and transfer service companies around the world, not directly at individual consumers. Ripple has built a distributed digital payment network without a central node, using distributed identity authentication technology, similar to the world's hottest blockchain technology.

A few months ago, Ripple announced its "InterLedger" protocol project, the goal of which is to create a global unified payment standard and a unified network financial transmission protocol. Currently, Ripple has cooperated with 25 companies around the world, 10 of which are the world's top 50 banks. The public partners include Fidor Bank, CBW Bank, Cross River Bank, Earthport, CGI, IntellectEU and Accenture.

At present, there are still too few enterprises, banks and individual users using InterLedger distributed protocols in China, and there is still a long way to go to achieve the goal of freely transferring payments between different networks. In early 2016, Nilesh Dusane, vice president of sales and customer relations at Ripple, and his team came to China and visited Chinese companies and institutions such as Leiying Investment Management (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. to discuss the possibility of subsequent development and cooperation.

Ripple stopped operating ripple trade at the beginning of this year and focused on developing enterprise-level cross-border payment solutions, which also marked a change in Ripple's strategic direction. Regarding Ripple's long-term low-key development, community users have many doubts: why did the strategic direction change, why did it close ripple trade, and how is the ILP project progressing? With these questions in mind, we took the opportunity of Ripple's business discussion with Lei Ying to interview Ripple about its strategic changes and future plans:

8btc: As far as I know, you did not join Ripple when it was first founded. Can you talk about why you decided to join Ripple at that time?

Nilesh: I am the Vice President of Sales and Customer Relationships at Ripple. Prior to Ripple, I had worked in the financial services industry for 18 years, developing payment technology solutions at CashEdge/Fiserv. Ripple offered me an opportunity to work on this emerging cross-border payment solution, bringing this new technology to banking institutions around the world. The distributed financial technology developed by Ripple (similar to blockchain) can provide faster and lower-cost cross-border transactions. This is an exciting breakthrough technology that will have a huge impact on the way value is transferred.

8btc: Many people may still have doubts. We already have Bitcoin, so why do we need Ripple?

Nilesh: Ripple's goal is to provide financial institutions with cross-currency settlement solutions to help them easily realize cross-border remittances. Ripple's digital asset XRP can play a role in improving liquidity between currency combinations with poor liquidity. Bitcoin is mainly used by merchants and individual consumers, and we believe that XRP will be adopted by banks and market makers. We believe that the world cannot adopt only one currency or a single ledger.

8btc: Can you talk about the current progress of Ripple’s cooperation with banks, financial institutions, etc.?

Nilesh: We have already reached partnerships with 25 financial institutions, including 10 of the world's top 50 banks. We are in in-depth talks with 80 banks, and this year, you will see more banks begin to adopt Ripple's solutions. Our current partners include Fidor Bank, CBW Bank, Cross River Bank, Earthport, CGI, IntellectEU and Accenture.

8btc: Recently, the concepts of blockchain and digital currency have been hotly discussed around the world. Does this have any impact on Ripple?

Nilesh: We have been focusing on building enterprise-grade cross-border payment solutions for two years, and we will continue to help banks integrate these solutions. We prefer the term "distributed financial technology" to "blockchain" because it includes many types of distributed ledger technology, so from our perspective, it is more accurate than blockchain. We are very happy to see that the financial industry, especially transaction bankers, are formulating strategies on how to apply distributed financial technology solutions to corporate business.

8btc: Ripple released the Interledger protocol a few months ago, with the goal of creating a global unified payment standard and a unified network financial transmission protocol. How is the project progressing?

Nilesh: Our web standards officer, Adrian Hope-Bailie, has become the co-chair of the W3C Web Payments Working Group. In 2015, we have been in various dialogues with W3C working groups and community groups to educate them about ILP (Interledger Protocol) and its use cases. We will embed ILP into all of Ripple's enterprise products so that banks can easily enjoy the benefits of this protocol.

8btc: Ripple has made some strategic changes recently, which may be reflected in the closure of Ripple Trade and the gradual transition to providing services to banks and other institutions. What are the reasons for these changes?

Nilesh: RippleTrade is one of our first products, focusing on consumers and merchants. While we focus on developing cross-border payment solutions for financial institutions, we also consider how to provide services to individual users of Ripple and develop service products for individual consumers. So we announced that individual users of Ripple will be seamlessly migrated to GateHub, a company that provides wallet services in the Ripple ecosystem. We believe that GateHub can provide an excellent user experience for individual users of Ripple.

8btc: Lei Ying's Quanbitong Gateway is a new Ripple gateway born in China. What do you think of these Chinese Ripple-related companies and the entire Chinese market? Do you have any special goals for coming to China this time? Will you reach cooperation with relevant Chinese companies and institutions?

Nilesh: We are very happy to see that the Ripple ecosystem continues to grow. China will definitely become a key market for Ripple's enterprise solutions. The purpose of this trip is to meet with Chinese banks and their corporate clients to discuss the possibility of implementing Ripple solutions. This trip to China is of great significance, and we hope to share more details with you in the coming months.

8btc: Judging from the evaluation of the entire community, Ripple is relatively low-key. What development plans does Ripple have in the near future?

Nilesh: In 2016, Ripple will continue to focus on working with banks to integrate our cross-currency settlement solutions into their businesses. We will also continue to educate the world on interoperability, such as through open source protocols like ILP. Last week we announced our partnership with SBI, and we are particularly excited to be working with SBI to open a joint venture, SBI Ripple Aisa, which will help us expand our business in Asia.

Reporter: Meng Dada
Source: Babbitt Information