Argentinian Bank Now Using Bitcoin for Cross-Border Transactions

Argentinian Banco Masventas (BMV), has announced a partnership Bitex to enable clients to use Bitcoin for international payments as an alternative to SWIFT, according to a Facebook post May 21. Bitex is a blockchain-based financial services provider based in Latin America.

According to BMV, the new service allows customers to transfer money from account to account in less time than traditional bank transfers. BMV states that the new service will reduce transfer times by up to 24 hours.

José Humberto Dakak, a principal shareholder of Masventas, said that the move intends to strengthen the bank’s digital and smartphone-based services and reduce banking service costs. He said:

“One of the initiatives is to use Bitex as a strategic partner to provide our overseas customers with payment and collection services at the Bitex Exchange.”

In addition to expediting transfers, Bitex claims that it can provide more secure transactions. According to their website, Bitex observes “the strictest compliance rules” and know-your-client (KYC) measures. They have also hired one of the “Big Four” accounting and audit firms, Deloitte, to serve as an impartial third party to review and report on operations, procedures, as well as on balances and funds of users and the company.

Earlier this month, a pilot of Ripple (XRP)’s xRapid platform was launched, which is designed to facilitate cross-border fiat transfers between financial institutions. Organizations who participated in the project reported transaction savings of 40-70 percent. Payments through the new pilot reportedly took around two minutes, as opposed to the average 2-3 days required by many conventional cross-border payments.

In March, financial messaging provider SWIFT published a report on how distributed ledger technology (DLT) proof of concept (PoC) could help nostro account reconciliations. According to SWIFT, the PoC, “went extremely well, proving the fantastic progress that has been made with DLT and the Hyperledger fabric in particular.”