$55 million has been raised for Ripple – a start-up backed by Google that makes use of blockchain technology to handle financial transactions done between some of the biggest banks in the world.
The latest banks to join are Accenture Ventures, Standard Chartered, Japan’s SBI Holdings, and SCB Digital Ventures which is another arm of Siam Commercial Bank. Other investors include Venture 51, and Santander Innoventures which is the associated with Seagate Technology by CME Group.
With the new raise, corporate partners who are strategic in their dealings to join along with others that have been part of it like Google’s venture arm, GV, IDG Capital Partners, AME Cloud Ventures, and Andreessen Horowitz.
The total of what the company has raised amounts to $93 million with Ripple focusing on providing banks with this technology so as to aid their cross-border transactions more efficiently.
According to what is obtainable, it may take days to conduct an international payment which is also done at a cost that is quite high. The promise Ripple has is that can reduce this cost by 33 percent with its technology and also enable money lenders to carry out transactions in a matter of seconds.
Banks have been plagued by low-value but high-volume transactions like Facebook pays to app developers. Banks end up not profiting from this with a large amount of work involved the percentage they get aren’t so rewarding. But Ripple is promising to make it more profitable for them.
Out of the 50 global banks, 15 including Santander and UBS are currently working with the start-up.
According to Ripple chief executive, Chris Larsen, when speaking with CNBC on the phone, said the fresh funds from the company is invested into global expansion.
He added that offices, teams are being expanded with intention of hiring engineers that will be hands on with the banks to makes things move.
After opening an office in Luxemburg, the company is considering opening more in Frankfurt and Singapore.
The blockchain – Ripple’s technology base works as a big decentralized ledger just as is obtainable with digital currency bitcoin that takes note of every transaction and stores the gathered information on a network that is global in such a way that is cannot be tampered with. This is where banks hope to make use of for security exchanges and remittances.
Experts are of the opinion the blockchain will be of tremendous help to banks transactions and reduction of error and time spent on checking error. However, they have called Ripple to be made more secure.
With the fresh funds gotten for Ripple, the company now has more to work with. There are also chances of acquisition to be made in the future as time goes by.
