India's Axis Bank to Launch Ripple Payments

India-based Axis Bank will soon begin leveraging distributed ledger tech.

Announced this week, Axis will use Ripple's network for cross-border transactions. As reported by regional news source The Economic Times, the solution's underlying technology will enable real-time settlement for cross-border payments – an area the bank is targeting for future growth.

"We are committed to using innovation in technology to make banking simple and convenient for our customers," deputy managing director V Srinivasan said in a statement, according to the paper.

The launch comes just a few months after Axis partnered with Kotak Mahindra Bank, another Indian banking institution, to test blockchain for new client-facing services. In October, media sources reported that Axis officials were looking ahead to potential product launches utilizing the tech but demurred when asked about any potential launch dates.

"We will come out with solutions for our customers soon, but we don’t want to commit to any time frame," the bank’s president and CIO, Amit Sethi, said at the time.

It was in the middle of last year that Axis's work with blockchain first began to come to light, as reported by The Economic Times. Over the summer, the bank had launched a new FinTech accelerator aimed, in part, at exploring new services for blockchain.

But Axis isn’t the only bank in the region pushing ahead with blockchain.

Fellow Indian banking institution Yes Bank earlier this month announced that it had developed a blockchain-based vendor financing solution, leveraging the open-source Hyperledger code as a basis.

The developments suggest India could emerge at the forefront of enterprise blockchain testing this year should these developments continue to build momentum.

Disclosure: CoinDesk is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which has an ownership stake in Ripple. 

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