Ripple: XRP Pilot Cuts Payment Fees Up to 70%

Distributed ledger startup Ripple published the results of its xRapid pilot programs on Thursday,

The report focused on the company's offering centered around the cryptocurrency XRP, stating that pilot-takers saw significant savings on fees as well as overall transaction times. The company has announced a number of partnerships in recent months with companies piloting xRapid as well as xCurrent, another offering that does not utilize XRP.

Head of product Asheesh Birla told CoinDesk that the company looked at seven pilot projects, finding that the results were fairly similar across the board. As a result, the startup aggregated the data into the 40-70 percent savings released in its report on Thursday. He also noted that transactions across borders only took a few minutes, compared to a period of several days for traditional payments of that kind.

The platforms piloting xRapid recognized that speed, he said, adding "they were like, ‘Wow, this entire thing is happening in a matter of seconds all the way through,’ and that’s just not possible given the way the current legacy financial system works.”

While the transactions from one financial institution to another took a few minutes, the portion actually involving the XRP ledger only took a few seconds, Birla said. The bulk of the time spent was caused by the institutions converting fiat to XRP and back through local exchanges.

"It takes a few minutes to process and send out into local rails," he said.

Now Ripple plans to focus on moving from pilot programs to full-scale launches, he said, though there is no firm timeline yet for those plans.

"We’re going to continue running pilots and we’re working on putting the final touches on the product. The next step now is moving those customers from pilot to production," Birla explained, adding:

"With financial products and payments, there is no Silicon Valley ‘move fast and break things,’ we really have to make sure we’re buttoned up from security standpoint, from the compliance standpoint.”

XRP token image via Shutterstock