Biggest financial conglomerate of Australia implements ‘XRP standard’

• CommBank said that starting this month they would leverage Ripple’s XRP to adopt the ISO 20022 standard for cross-border payments.
• The bank plans to completely migrate all its transactions to ISO 20022 over the next three years.

Ripple’s native cryptocurrency XRP has been designed in a way to facilitate instant cross-border settlements over the XRP Ledger. In the latest development, the Bank of Australia’s largest financial conglomerate, CommBank, said that they would be using Ripple’s XRP and ISO 20022 standard for cross-border payments.

It will start migrating all its cross-border to the XRP standard this month and shall complete the migration of all payments conducted over the next three months. The latest announcement came two days back as the CommBank published a post of scheduled maintenance.

Hi there. From November 2022 cross border payments will start to migrate to ISO 20022 with all payments to be made and received using ISO 20022 by November 2025. Cross-border payments will be greatly simplified as a result. ^Delz

— CommBank (@CommBank) November 17, 2022

However, one of the followers inquired whether this maintenance was part of the ISO 20022 upgrade on the platform. Responding to it CommBank said:

Hi there. From November 2022 cross border payments will start to migrate to ISO 20022 with all payments to be made and received using ISO 20022 by November 2025. Cross-border payments will be greatly simplified as a result.

Ripple has been working with banking institutions to facilitate faster cross-border payments for a while. Its blockchain-based RippleNet is already very popular and used by more than 200 banking and financial institutions worldwide.

The RippleNet solution already complies with the ISO 20022 standard which is now becoming the de facto global standard for modern payments. “To help enable this next step in global interoperability and meet the evolving needs of our customers, Ripple is now part of the ISO 20022 Standards Body—the first member focused on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT),” said Ripple.

Ripple’s Gateway to CBDC

Although this is an exciting development, CommBank is not the first Australian Bank to adopt this interbank correspondence standard. Earlier this year in March, the National Australia Bank (NAB) started adopting ISO 20022 via RippleNet.

Along with Ripple, only one other blockchain platform Stellar Lumens has adopted this standard. ISO 20022 is the global standard for exchanging electronic messages between financial institutions through the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT).

This opens up the gates for both Ripple and Stellar to work on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). The ISO 20022 will completely change the way how digital assets and fiat currency systems interact with each other.

Earlier this year, Novatti Group Limited (a Germany-based digital payments firm) announced a partnership with Ripple to issue an Australian Dollar-backed stablecoin, AUDC. Also, the Aurei (AUR) stablecoin will soon be available on the XRP ledger. The Australian CBDC will also be compatible with other blockchain platforms such as Flare and Songbird.

To facilitate high-value cross-border transactions, the European Union is also transitioning to ISO 20022 starting this month. Some experts believe that ISO-compliant cryptocurrency will change the digital asset landscape. They also believe regulators will ease their strict stance in dealing with ISO 20022 assets.