Ripple Is In Dialogue With Over 20 Central Banks On CBDCs, Exec Reveals

In a new interview, Brooks Entwistle, senior vice president of customer success and managing director of APAC and MENA at Ripple, talked about the company’s efforts and goals in the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) space, revealing some interesting details.

The exec explained that interaction with regulators around the world is “invaluable.” Unlike the U.S., regulators “in Singapore, in Tokyo, in Switzerland, in the UK” welcome dialogue and participate in roundtable discussions.

Ripple In Dialogue With More 20 Central Banks

As Bitcoinist reported, CBDCs are a key focus for Ripple in 2023 and Entwistle reaffirmed this, presenting his company as a solution provider to which central banks and authorities can turn. “There are 200-plus countries out there. There are a lot of central banks and they have different needs and there are different parts of this journey,” Entwistle said.

While some countries are well advanced, the digital yuan in China and others, there are many emerging markets that are smaller, that have fewer resources, that have other issues where Ripple can help an important part. In this context, Entwistle revealed that the fintech is already in dialogue with more than 20 central banks:

So, we are in dialogue with not ten, not twenty, but a bunch more central banks around the world on these discussions.

The Ripple executive cited the already well-known projects with Bhutan and Palau as examples. Regarding regulatory headwinds in the U.S., Entwistle revealed that this is why Ripple is focusing on the international market, where the company hired most of its 300 new employees last year.

“The bulk of our business is outside the U.S. right now,” Entwistle said, further elaborating that Ripple is making rapid progress in crypto-friendly jurisdictions. Therefore, interacting with regulators in real time is very important, he said.

To this end, Ripple has been expanding its policy team over the past year to take an aggressive approach.

That means, to your point on not just issuing white papers or responding to things very quietly in the background, we need to be hosting events, having our customer conferences, being on standby for when someone does call and says, ‘Listen, we could use an explanation about CBDCs or the like.’

Asked about the fierce competition in the cross-border payments space, the Ripple senior vice president explained that cross-border flow of value is one of “the last great unsolved financial problems or puzzles in the world.” To solve this, it requires a global network.

And Ripple can provide this with its RippleNet. Entwistle divulged that the technology is now in more than 70 countries.

You can’t put together a 70-country network with hundreds of participants on it overnight. Yes, there are lots of great innovations across single corridors or within certain regions. […] We offer a holistic global solution […] So we just need to keep running hard and keep adding great people.

Always great to catch up with @Forkast_News and the dynamic @AngieTVLau discussing @Ripple’s outlook on the crypto industry – despite some serious turbulence, the opportunity for real world use cases remains strong, and why we believe APAC can lead the way. Let’s keep building. https://t.co/ph0dQG3u5N

— Brooks Entwistle (@BrooksEntwistle) February 28, 2023