With Europe’s new payments law now requiring banks to share customer account data with fintech firms, the prevailing vibe was that there’s plenty of action without messing around with crypto.
Perhaps nothing drove that point home more than the face-off between Gottfried Leibbrandt, the chief executive officer of Swift, and Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of San Francisco’s
Ripple Labs Inc. Swift is a 46-year-old cooperative that directs trillions of dollars in cross-border payments between thousands of banks. Garlinghouse has repeatedly vowed to leapfrog Swift’s 1970s-conceived system with a faster, cheaper blockchain-like one.
“I look at the dynamic between Ripple and Swift, and I liken it to Amazon and Wal-Mart,” Garlinghouse said on Wednesday to a packed auditorium.
Panel discussions on disrupting banks take place.
Source: Paris Fintech Forum
Leibbrandt countered that for two years, Swift’s latest payment standard revitalized its system, letting customers track a payment like a FedEx package, and cutting transfer time to hours. Unlike Ripple, which has struggled to sign up major banks, Leibbrandt said the world’s top 60 lenders are utilizing its technology, which is already embraced by regulators.
“Banks are not ready for a model where you convert into a crypto and then convert back again,” Leibbrandt said. “It’s not clear to us that blockchain is better than what we have today.”