Ripple - arealive/Viper GitHub Wiki

Ripple, which offers a blockchain-like rail for faster settlement of international payments, and has nothing to do with bitcoin, has added 75 banking clients already...

Ripple’s value proposition to banking clients is cheaper rates and faster transfer times for international payments. The bank’s customers don’t have to know or care that they’re using Ripple (it isn’t like you’d tell your bank, “I want to send this money using Ripple”), but would certainly notice the faster transaction time than they’re used to.

Garlinghouse gives the pitch to banks this way: “If your customer wants to send yen to Japan, you are captive to the correspondent banking network and your customer has a bad experience and you, as a bank, have to endure cost to transmit that money.”

Ripple’s Consensus Ledger can process 1,000 transactions per second, and settles an international payment in three seconds on average. (He compares that to the bitcoin blockchain, which has slowed recently to two hours per transaction, creating a debate over block size; to be fair, both speeds are much faster than sending money with a traditional clearinghouse like Western Union.)

Ripple can also be used for in-country payments; many of the banks in Japan are using Ripple for domestic payments due to the sluggishness of the local payments network there. But for the most part, Ripple is focusing on cross-border payments because that’s the biggest pain point for banks and banking customers.

Santander added a function to its mobile app that lets customers send money abroad over the Ripple network. While Ripple is hardly the only blockchain-for-banking startup out there, Garlinghouse boasts, “We are the only company in the space with real customers.” Competitors, Garlinghouse says, “are still playing in the sandbox. And proof of concepts are not a business model.” ¹

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/75-banks-now-ripples-blockchain-network-162939601.html