Ripple has announced that the National Commercial Bank (NCB) of the Kingdom Saudi Arabia (KSA) has become its latest enterprise customer. Ripple made the announcement of the news on its own website. The NCB joins RippleNet, Ripple’s fast-growing, global network of banks, payment providers, digital asset exchanges, and corporates. It is yet another big bank that joins Ripple. 

NCB, which was founded in 1953, says that it manages 512 branches across the KSA, has over 3.3 million customers, and is the largest financial asset manager in the Middle East. Furthermore, the institute is the second largest bank by asset in the Arab world and practices Islamic banking and finance.

According to the announcement, the NCB’s decision to join RippleNet and become a customer of Ripple’s xCurrent product follows the conclusion of a pilot programme involving KSA’s central bank, the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority (SAMA), which signed an agreement with Ripple in February 2018 to “help banks in the KSA improve their payments infrastructure using xCurrent. The purpose of this pilot programme was for participating banks from the KSA to “use xCurrent to instantly settle payments sent into and out of the country, with greater transparency and lower costs.”

The official announcement by Ripple states:

“As more banks in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Middle East connect to RippleNet, their customers — real people and families across the world — will ultimately benefit. For SMEs and corporations that depend on NCB, more efficient and transparent remittances will provide stability and help them grow their business faster.”

This is a huge win for Ripple as KSA is a major player in the remittance world, with the World Bank’s remittances data “showing that 308 million dollars were sent into the KSA, and 37 billion dollars in remittances were sent from the country in 2016.”

NCB will be in production on RippleNet by the end of Q4 2018. Big things happening for Ripple in the upcoming months!

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