Open source payments outfit Ripple Labs has snared deals with two US banks who plans to use its real-time settlement protocol for cross-border money transfers.
Cross River Bank and century-old CBW Bank says they will use will use the Ripple protocol to offer business and personal banking customers international payments between the US and Western Europe.
They follows in the wake of Germany's Fidor Bank, which in May became the first the bank in the world to utilise Ripple for sending real-time money transfers.
San Francisco-based Ripple Labs offers a decentralised order book relying on open-source peer-to-peer payment protocols to speed the transfer of financial information.
The software company's team of 60 is comprised of cryptographers, security experts, distributed network developers, Silicon Valley and Wall Street veterans. They contribute code to the protocol and create tools to ease integration with with banks' back-end infrastructure.
Applications like Ripple are considered to pose a credible threat to the long-term future of traditional payment networks such as Swift, by allowing banks to to seamlessly transact with other institutions without the need for correspondent banks, fees, time delays or additional integration work.
"Today's banks offer the equivalent of 300-year-old paper ledgers converted to an electronic form a digital skin on an antiquated transaction process," says Suresh Ramamurthi, chairman and CTO of CBW Bank. "Ripple addresses the structural problem of payments as IP-based settlement infrastructure that powers the exchange of any types of value."