In a milestone achievement that marks the intersection between traditional banking institutions and the digital currency world, Argentina’s Banco Masventas (BMV) announced on Monday that it will allow its customers to make cross-border international payments using bitcoin.
This decision of using an alternative payment option to SWIFT, arrived after the bank forming a partnership with a Latin American cryptocurrency exchange Bitex. Banco Masventas (BMV), probably, is the first bank on the planet to allow its customers to make use of bitcoin as a payment option. The bank states that under this new provision, customers will be able to send money to 50 different countries to 50 different countries using Bitex with a fee of 3% + VAT.
Jose Dakak, a principal shareholder of Masventas has appreciated the bank towards a broader drive of going digital while adopting new emerging technologies as well as lowering the costs of bank’s services. Dakak said:
“One of the actions was to contract Bitex as a strategic partner in the implementation of the Bitex platform for payments and collections operations for our clients abroad.”
Bitex chief marking officer Manuel Beaudroit told CoinDesk that the bank will soon be using bitcoin will be used for real-world transactions considering the fact that the service has been launched just yesterday. He added:
“The customers will ask the bank to do an international payment, and the bank uses Bitex as a provider. For the customer, it’s transparent, they don’t touch, they don’t see the bitcoin. We are a provider for them, and they are not touching bitcoin.”
The system of payment transfers works exactly to how Ripple’s XRP tokens are transferred. Instead of bouncing the fiat currency between the SWIFT network of the banks, bitcoin’s are being transferred to the exchanges which are able to cash out the cryptocurrencies.
The main difference is that bitcoin has higher transfer costs in comparison to the XRP tokens and more importantly they take more time relative to Ripple’s instant transfers. This is probably one of the major reasons why Ripple has managed to establish more ties with banking institutions and why the other systems have been rejected.
Now that Bitex and BMV are using bitcoin, they might consider sending payments and transactions in one or two big batched per day. This project might set a new precedence as to developing new alternatives to Ripple.
In the long run, there is every possibility that banks themselves might incorporate an infrastructure which starts offering crypto transfers along with fiat currencies with the growing mainstream adoption of digital currencies.
The post appeared first on .
