The London Blockchain Summit recently closed its doors after more than a hundred guest speakers attended with representatives from some of the world’s biggest companies on the panels. One of the speakers that attended the summit was the Global Head of Banking for Ripple, Marjan Delatinne. When Delatinne took to the stage in London, many topics were raised including Ripple as it relates to the new xRapid platform, SWIFT, MoneyGram and even Facebook’s upcoming Libra stablecoin. xRapid Speaking on the platform, Delatinne said: “xCurrent is our core product. We have more than 200 customers using it, and we sign on average three to five institutions a week.” The Head of Banking went on to explain that xCurrent uses the power of distributed ledger technology in “exchanging value fiat to fiat, so it’s business as usual.” Delatinne goes on to say that the new platform is a way of manoeuvring the normal practice of tying up trillions of dollars in certain accounts by banks to ensure that value exchange between these banks run as swiftly (pardon the pun) as possible. SWIFT Speaking of SWIFT, before she joined Ripple Delatinne had been working at SWIFT for about ten years. The now global head was the centre of the companies Global Payments Innovation (GPI) service which values itself on that half of its transactions are completed within thirty minutes with the longest being settled within 24 hours. “Swift is improving dramatically, the way that the payments happen today, but it’s still about the messaging,” she said. “You still send a message to another party. I don’t call it settlement, because this is not a settlement, it’s around the fact that I can send a message in a faster way, and I can track it. This is an improvement from previously, where it could take days.” Nevertheless, Delatinne is still confident that neither Ripple or SWIFT are competitors and that both can be utilised by the financial world. “We are not replacing Swift, as Swift has its own value and I think we can be very complementary. It comes back to what is best for the community and how they can take advantage of both.”