Competition in the business of facilitating cross-border payments has just gotten tighter. Until recently, the primary fintech challenger to the reigning SWIFT international payment system has been Ripple Labs and its various products designed for the institutional banking sector. The first week of September saw the game-changing news break, as IBM (NYSE:IBM) announced promotion of its DLT-powered payment system, Blockchain World Wire (BWW), from beta to a ready-for-use product.
Operating on the Stellar blockchain, the new financial rail will provide an infrastructure for clearing and settling cross-border payments with finality “in near real-time,” at the same time reducing transaction costs by removing third-party intermediaries from the process. Pervasiveness of IBM-powered solutions in global finance — the company claims to be handling around 60 percent of the world’s transactional systems — provides BWW with a hefty launching pad, immediately propelling it to the top tier of the industry that is poised to grow to a size of $2 trillion by 2020.
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