Western Union – the world’s leading international money transfer service is set to utilize blockchain tech – Ripple for making its cross border transfers secure and very fast.

One of the global financial services ‘big whales’, Western Union, has finally made it known to the world that it’s indeed trying to work with the Ripple digital currency, after a long-rumored partnership.

Raj Agrawal – WU Chief Financial Officer has stated out in an interview for Bloomberg [Feb 14] that the service is testing out transactions that are backed up by Ripple’s [XRP] blockchain-based system.

The testing phase is going on for more than a month now which do confirm the rumors that are spreading [in the crypto-world like wildfire] since early January.

As Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse told Bloomberg, WU has decided to look into their platform in order to facilitate money transfers, particularly cross-border ones. Garlinghouse explained their choice by claiming that Ripple allows for transactions that are “a thousand times faster and a thousand times cheaper than Bitcoin’s.”

Chief Executive Officer from Western Union – Hikmet Ersek added:

“We are looking especially in the processing settlement and working capital optimization, also in the regulation part, on the compliance part on the blockchain capabilities,” Ersek said, adding “we do have some tests with Ripple.”

The Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority (SAMA) — the central bank for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) — has signed an agreement with Ripple to help banks in the KSA improve their payments infrastructure using xCurrent.

This ground-breaking pilot program is the first of its kind to be launched by a central bank. Participating banks from the KSA will use xCurrent to instantly settle payments sent into and out of the country, with greater transparency and lower costs.

Developments like this [Ripple related] feel like they are daily, and everybody knows that these are a fuel for the market.

A just declared partnership has been signed down by the San Francisco located start-up Ripple and a UAE [Abu Dhabi] based remittance firm.

The tech, as mentioned in various statements, is about to find use by UAE Exchange to hoist the competitive environment in the market for remittances:

“The early adoption of this game-changing technology allows us to offer a competitive service, as it will have an impact on the speed and cost of cross-border transactions,” Promoth Manghat, the company’s chief executive, was quoted as saying by Business Insider.

The post Ripple To Go: Western Union Testing Transfers appeared first on Ethereum World News.