RippleNet member Siam Commercial Bank (SCB), Thailand’s oldest bank, announced a partnership with money transfer service Azimo on April 9 that will see the two parties use Ripple’s technology to facilitate instant cross-border transfers from Europe to Thailand.

The development allows clearances from Pounds and Euros to the Thai Baht to be made in less than a minute, as opposed to days or weeks. This is particularly important given that Thailand is one of the world’s largest remittance destinations.

Azimo itself partnered with Ripple in February 2020, with the intention being to leverage Ripple’s on-demand liquidity services to bring its remittance features to the Philippines, which itself averages over $30 billion in remittances. 

Azimo co-founder and executive chairman Michael Kent mentioned the incredible reduction in transaction times, 

Thailand recently launched their instant payment network, and this partnership with the largest bank in the country allows us to get the time to settle payments down from around 24 hours to an average of 22 seconds. [It’s] faster to send money to Thailand than to someone else in Europe.

The SCB has already piloted Ripple’s technology for cross-border payments, in September 2018 becoming the first RippleNet member to test a multi-hop feature that allows them to make payments on behalf of other financial institutions. It has also created a new mobile app to allow for instant cross-border payments from mobile phones. 

The RippleNet now has over 300 members, many of whom have trialled the technology and seen great reductions in both transfer cost and time.