Ripple Tapping into a Big Remittance Market by Launching a New Corridor via SABB

A new corridor has been added to the already vast list of Ripple’s corridors that it is pushing its products into. The new fast and cost-effective corridor is India and Saudi Arabia as revealed by Navin Gupta at the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) 2019.

Majed Najm, the CEO of HSBC Saudi Arabia launched the new remittance technology of SABB that is designed to make cross border transactions an easy affair for Indian citizens in Saudi Arabia Kingdom (KSD).

Navin Gupta, the Managing Director of Ripple’s South East Asia and the MENA region shared the latest update through Twitter on April 25th.

“Launch of SABB's remittance corridor to India at FSC 2019 by Majed Najm. Customers can enjoy the benefit of Ripple's blockchain tech delivering transparent and real-time payments from KSA to India,”

said Gupta.

India Presents a Big Remittance Market Opportunity

The Saudi British Bank (SABB) is one of the five largest Saudi banks by deposits which is a Riyadh-based Saudi joint stock company. British banking firm HSBC Holdings also owns a minority stake in SABB.

SABB is one of the three banks approved by the central bank to test with Ripple for the instant settlement of cross-border transfers by using blockchain technology. In February, Ripple officially shared insight into a pilot program with the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority (SAMA) for Saudi banks.

The program has been the first of its kind launched by a central bank to settle payments instantly in and out of the country with lower costs and greater transparency. It has been revealed that per this agreement, Ripple will help banks in the KSA to improve their payment infrastructure by leveraging xCurrent.

According to World Bank’s report, in 2018, India remained at the top spot in remittance recipient at $79 billion that grew by more than 14 percent. Moreover, in Saudi Arabia, Indian citizens are recorded as the second higher foreigners at more than 5 million individuals. Now SABB’s latest initiative will make it easy and less costly for Indians to send money back home.

As Ripple moves to the India corridor, it is opening itself to a market that has big remittance market opportunity.