Traditional financial institutions and payment remittance companies have been rather reluctant to admit that cryptocurrencies could spell the end of their reign. One of the largest payment facilitators in the world has just taken yet another potshot at the crypto world, calling them useless.
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) made the comment at a breakfast in London, with the SWIFT spokesperson saying:
Cryptocurrencies go down in value like a yoyo. They’re useless and unstable. And even if crypto companies do make it stable, it’s still a basket of currencies.
SWIFT Using Its Own Tech
Rather than running to Ripple like many other banks around the globe, SWIFT has been hard at work creating its own high-performance remittance tech. In fact, it’s so good that Ripple has repeatedly tried to claim that it’s working with SWIFT, but every time SWIFT has slammed the comments as fake news. In the pilot phase of SWIFT’s new platform, it managed to achieve payments between Singapore and Australia in under one minute. While it’s still not quite as quick as Ripple’s xRapid platform, it’s still considerably faster than existing solutions.
Various Partners On-Board
When it comes to rolling out its new platform, SWIFT has a major advantage over the likes of Ripple – it already has 11,000 banks and institutions using its systems. Ripple has been struggling to land big-name institutions on its xRapid platform, leaving the few banks using the system very limited use cases for the tech. Once SWIFT is happy with its new platform, it can quickly and easily roll it out to its wide network of banking partners, allowing the world to upgrade the way it conducts payments.
SWIFT has a feeling that Synthetic Hegemonic Currencies (SHC) like Libra could eventually become the future and used in a platform to rival its tech, but for now they’re still a long way from launching. Until then, SWIFT is very confident that it’s the big daddy of the payment remittance world and it can’t see that changing.
