Ripple recently announced a new feature to its new product, RippleNet which is reportedly called “multi-hop”. According to the press release by the company, this feature will be tested by the major financial institution Siam Commercial Bank (SCB) which. The bank will reportedly be the first company which will perform the testing. The announcement also confirmed that the testing of the new feature will begin on the date of the press release, on September 28.
The newly added feature of multi-hop will aim at allowing the users to settle frictionless payments on behalf of other financial institutions on the network. Due to this, financial institutions will have no need to have one to one connection between each other in order to settle a payment. As a result and during the testing period, SCB “will be able to receive and forward on a payment without a bilateral relationship between the originator and beneficiary institutions”.
The announcement went on stating that “with multi-hop, financial institutions can connect directly to SCB, which can settle and payout across the region without exchanging currencies multiple times and adding heavy fees. The result is a seamless payments experience into and out of the ASEAN region. For smaller financial institutions which previously did not have the ability to make payments into ASEAN, multi-hop will democratize access to those countries and make payments easier, regardless of payment size or their financial institution’s pool of liquidity”.
In addition, the company also highlighted the key advantages of the new feature which apparently can be used not only in financial sectors. “Now, the customers of RippleNet institutions, including remitters and SMEs, will see their payments settle faster, cheaper and more transparently”, concluded the official message by Ripple.
