Thailand’s longest-running and largest mainstream bank Siam Commercial Bank (SCB) rolls out an instant payment app powered by Ripple, as per Ripple’s official blog post dated 8th Jan 2020.
Ripple’s never-seen-before technology has garnered immense attention from banks all over the world, quickly making it a go-to network for facilitating super fast international remittances. Vietnamese bank, Tien Phong Commercial Bank (TPBank) embraced Ripple’s DLT-based remittance network, RippleNet, to explore the enterprise-grade blockchain payments network in November last year. Moreover, in October, India’s leading commercial bank, Federal Bank, also vouched for Ripple’s ability to revolutionize the payments industry and integrated it into its platform.
SCB, the century-old bank with an extensive user base with over sixteen million customers, joined the Ripple bandwagon last year when it hinted at using Ripple’s technology to facilitate instant, efficient, and affordable cross-border payments. The transaction time reduced drastically, from over two days to a matter of seconds.
SCB gets onboard Ripple network to launch instant payment app
Today, it has collaborated with Ripple to launch an innovative instant payment app, called SCB Easy, which is, needless to say, which is boosted by Ripple to enable fast, seamless, low-cost international payments.
Arthit Sriumpor, who is a Senior Vice President at SCB, pointed out the challenges the payments industry faces today. It has become an extremely time-consuming task to send and receive money today. Besides having to go to a bank personally, the customer spends an endless amount of time filling out lengthy and complicated application forms. The forms request too many personal details which customers take time to fill out and verify it against the original documents, he highlighted.
Now, with SCB Easy, sending money overseas will no longer be a cumbersome task. They can easily do so using this instant payment app, while their family and friends get to receive it instantly, Sriumpor confirmed. Sriumpor further went on to demonstrate live on-stage how the app functions and successfully transferred money to a recipient bank overseas within a span of just forty seconds.
SCB-Ripple to eliminate the need to convert to local currency when traveling overseas
Meanwhile, SCB looking to expand its presence in other Asian markets such as Cambodia, Vietnam, and Myanmar. It has already joined hands with Ripple for another project involving international EMVCo-QR payments, which will not only streamline remittances but also enable micro-payment services.
Sriumpor elaborated on this futuristic feature by referring to an example of tourist wanting to purchase goods in Thailand. He will no longer need to convert to local currency and can make the purchase simply by scanning the QR code from his smartphone, Sriumpor explained.
All in all, SCB is thrilled to be a part of Ripple’s emergent technology and Sriumpor concluded the announcement by stating that together, we are bettering lives.
Featured Image by Pixabay
