Ripple has announced a new partnership with the largest bank of Egypt, the National Bank of Egypt (NBE) for the financial institution to use the firm’s RippleNet to connect with the UAE-based financial services provider LuLu Exchange.
According to an announcement published by the firm, the partnership’s goal is to help NBE process cross-border transactions from the UAE to Egypt. Currently, Egypt is one of the largest remittance recipients in the world, having received $24 billion last year alone. It falls behind India China, Mexico, and the Philippines.
Remittances play a “significant role in a country’s gross domestic product,” it adds, as they represent money sent home to family and friends. Remittance providers currently work with the traditional global payments infrastructure, which causes “causes cross-border remittances to be costly and slow.”
The partnership will see both NBE and the LuLu Exchange take advantage of RippleNet, which uses blockchain technology to move funds across the globe for a fraction of the cost of the traditional financial system.
Hesham Elsafty, Group Head for Financial Institutions and International Financial Services at NBE, was quoted saying:
NBE’s partnership with Ripple will help to improve overall efficiency by enabling NBE to establish new alliances across wider markets with reduced cost and quicker integration time.
The partnership comes months after Ripple was sued by te U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which alleged Ripple and two of its executives, who are significant XRP holders, raised “over $1.3 billion through an unregistered, ongoing digital asset securities offering.”
The SEC’s lawsuit led to an XRP price crash. While the cryptocurrency later on recovered, it was delist from several major trading platforms operating in the United States. While most delisted the token, some like Uphold sided with Ripple.
Uphold pointed out at the time that the SEC’s goal is to protect consumers, and believes it’s hard to see “how a judgment rendering XRP essentially worthless and inflicting billions of dollars of losses on retail investors” would square with that goal.
Ripple itself has argued the lawsuit “already affected countless innocent XRP retail holders with no connection to Ripple.” It added it “muddied the waters for exchanges, market makers, and traders.”
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