Ripple’s Stefan Thomas was replaced as the company’s Chief technology officer (CTO) by David Schwartz who formerly held the chief cryptographer’s position at Ripple. Stefan Thomas formerly of Ripple now famously runs the Codius smart contract platform through his company, Coil. Shortly after the confirmation of his appointment, Mr David Schwartz admitted that building an ecosystem of financial institutions that operate using the block chain would be a tall order but at the same time, he had no doubt in his mind that the technically able team at Ripple had the ability to pull it off.
These words of confidence will kick start his reign as the Firms CTO and hopefully his optimism will help him in his new mandate which will involve decentralizing the Ripple ledger as well as taking the lead in making other technological projects at the company a success. In an effort to popularize himself with the rest of the Ripple community, he sat down with Asheesh Birla who is the senior vice president of product management at Ripple and one of his new colleagues; in an interactive and highly informative ask me anything (AMA) session.
In the AMA session, Schwartz revealed details of his recent European travels where he had met with a number of bank representatives. His biggest take away after the meetings with the bank reps is that they all had a fear of being disrupted by emergent technologies. Schwartz also stated that though the block-chain was in the corner of all bank representatives’ eyes, the more direct threat to them at the moment was the rise of non-bank payment solutions. The rise of non-bank payment companies and services was fast pushing banks out of the picture.
Upon this realization, banks are now beginning to take a long hard look at technology and exploring various ways they can benefit from it as well as various ways they can make significant investments. Banks are beginning to realize that unless they make strong technological changes, they just may be replaced by faster and more efficient technologies. David Schwartz believes that Ripple is the technology that will become the banking sector’s saving grace. David further stated that Ripple could provide banks with a great way to facilitate payments and be the intermediary to provide fast liquidity between assets.
With Ripple, assets will become more easily liquid and thus cheaper to transfer. It is evident that banks that embrace innovation could reap handsome productivity dividends and avoid the risk of being disrupted by emerging technologies. Ripple have identified an opportunity in the banking sector and will exploit it by providing technologies to banks that will enable them become more competitive and efficient while serving their customers.
