One of the main Australian banks is going to use Ripple to transfer payments between its subsidiaries, according to its chief information officer. He also believes the bank should store bitcoin and air miles.
David Whiteing, chief information officer of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, spoke about new technologies in general and Ripple in particular at a briefing hosted by the Australian Information Industry Association in Sydney. He told the bank has done “a whole bunch of experiments” with cryptocurrencies and is going “to launch using Ripple as a means to transfer payments” between its subsidiaries. However, for a while the use of Ripple will be confined to the internal payments of the Commonwealth Bank Group.
Whiteing also told that customers would probably be enabled to store various online assets in their bank accounts, from bitcoin to air miles and loyalty points. He remarked that the mobile app of the Commonwealth Bank already supports fifteen different currencies, and so “it shouldn’t be that difficult for us to then add cryptocurrencies to it and whatever other means of payment transfers people might want”.
The society is changing, explained the information officer, and the bank needs to evolve to a “technology company that does banking services”, because that is what the clients would expect. It is necessary therefore to respond quickly when new tech ideas are coming.
The Commonwealth Bank is one of the ‘big four’ Australian banks, together with National Australia Bank, ANZ and Westpac. It was founded in 1911 as a government bank and privatized in 1996. It has 11 million customers, most of them in Australia and Oceania. It is usually credited with being very innovative: it was the first local bank to offer P2P money exchange through its mobile app and allow NFC payments on mobile phones. The Commonwealth Bank app is used by 3.5 million customers.
CoinFox has recently written that Ripple Labs raised $28 million in Series A round led by a group of institutional investors planning to expand its international presence. It also announced its partnership with the remittance giant Western Union. According to Chris Larsen, founder and CEO of Ripple, the company concluded many more partnerships that make the staff “very, very excited and pleased” but are not yet announced in public.
CoinFox also covered the convergence between Ripple and the traditional financial services. In January 2015, Ripple Labs added Gene Sperling, an ex-economic advisor to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and one of the 100 most powerful people in global finance according to Worth Magazine, to its Board of Directors. In March, he was followed by Anja Manuel, a former employee of the U.S. Department of State in India and Middle East, who became an advisor to the company. Ripple technology was praised at the SWIFT Business Forum in March 2015.
