The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) may finally have some competition with a number of major global banks signing on with Ripple Labs Inc. to found a new group that will support a new global transfer system based on Ripple’s blockchain platform.

Founding members of the Global Payments Steering Group (GPSG) are Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Santander, UniCredit, Standard Chartered, Westpac Banking Corporation and Royal Bank of Canada.

The group intends to oversee the creation and maintenance of Ripple’s global payment transaction rules, formalized standards for activity using Ripple and other actions to support the implementation of Ripple’s blockchain based payment capabilities.

GPSG overall aim is to drastically reduce the time and cost of financial settlements while enabling new types of high-volume, low-value global transactions by building a modern payments network built on the blockchain, the first such inter-bank global transfer system to do so.

“Today, people expect money to move at the speed of the Internet. That’s why we’re working with these top banks to address the need for faster cross-border payments,” Ripple Chief Executive Officer and cofounder Chris Larsen said in a statement. “The work of GPSG, a new global interbank network, will give financial institutions and their customers the ability to make new types of payments at mass scale.”

Speed

If you’ve ever needed to transfer money offshore before, you’ll know how slow it can be, and much of that is due to the legacy network provided by SWIFT.

The Internet is hardly new and we have now for a decent amount of time been able to send emails to each other instantaneously, so why shouldn’t the transfer of fiat money, which in most cases primarily only exists in a digital form anyway, be any different?

While it’s early days for Ripple’s new GPSG group and ultimately to be totally successful they’ll need to sign on more partners, the concept of using the blockchain to enable instant or near-instant global transfers between banks is without question a solid one.

Ripple is already working with 15 of the top 50 global banks on internal blockchain transfer systems, making an inter-bank transfer platform their next logical step.

Image credit: Henk Caspers/Wikimedia Commons/CC by 2.0