MUSCAT: Oman’s second largest bank by market value, BankDhofar, has begun using RippleNet technology for cross-border payments to India. The news was tweeted by the managing director of South Asia and MENA at Ripple, Navin Gupta.

RippleNet is a global blockchain-based payment network of institutional payment providers, that was developed by technology company Ripple. In January, RippleNet expanded its network to over 200 customers, including such industry players as JNFX, SendFriend, Transpaygo, FTCS and Euro Exim Bank.

What is Ripple
Ripple is a real-time gross settlement system that also supports fiat currency, cryptocurrency, and commodity exchanges and remittances. The native cryptocurrency of the platform are Ripples, abbreviated as XRP.

Ripple was made by the Ripple company but can function without it due to its shared ledger. Used by companies such as UniCredit, UBS and Santander, Ripple has been increasingly adopted by banks and payment networks as settlement infrastructure technology because of the payment’s speed within the network, stability of the technology, and the ability to its coin as a bridge currency.

There were 100 billion XRP created at Ripple’s inception, which is the currency’s cap according to the protocol’s rules. Of the 100 billion created, 20 billion XRP were retained by the creators and the remaining 80% of the total were given to Ripple Labs for sale.

First Bank
Per the recent announcement, BankDhofar has become the first bank in the country and one of the first in the region to adopt RippleNet. The technology enables the bank to provide cross-border transfers via a mobile banking application “in less than 2 minutes,” thus allowing non-resident Indians living in Oman to conduct real-time payment transfers.

BankDhofar was incorporated in 1990, subsequently becoming one of the largest banks in the country. In 2017, BankDhofar’s revenue from banking services was reportedly $2.4 million, while its total revenue amounted to $28.2 million.

Earlier this month, Finablr, a global payment platform and foreign exchange operator based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), joined the RippleNet network to complete real-time transactions to Thailand. The first partner in the service, major Thai bank Siam Commercial Bank will purportedly let UAE Exchange and Unimoni customers globally send money to Thailand.

Last December, the National Bank of Kuwait (NBK) also launched a cross-border remittance product based on RippleNet’s blockchain technology. NBK reportedly become the first financial establishment in Kuwait to implement a remittance product — “NBK Direct Remit” — for international live payments based on RippleNet.