- A third-party surveyed with respondents from 21 nations.
- Ripple stated that the respondents “are directly involved with payment services at their organization.”
Ripple recently released a new “Blockchain in Payments” report. It indicated that three-quarters of the financial service providers voted that they are “very to extremely interested in digital assets.” The survey was conducted by a third party, which polled 1,053 respondents from 21 nations. As per Ripple’s report on the data, the respondents “are directly involved with payment services at their organization.” The organizations are comprised of retail bankers, digital bankers, payment aggregators and money transmitters.
Regarding the implementation of blockchain, more than a third of those respondents say they are “in production,” 27% say they’re nearing actual implementation. Ripple stated that the results show the financial services providers’ interest in exploring blockchain’s potential. However, the results only represent a minority.
Not only do this year’s respondents see greater market opportunities, but the majority of them (97%) are also either implementing or evaluating blockchain technology to capture these opportunities. They also express a stronger understanding of blockchain’s strengths than last year’s respondents:
Respondents see opportunity to double down in cross-border payments by both expanding existing services into new regions and introducing new services in existing regions.
They perceive stronger demand in three of the top four cross-border payments services: digital payments for goods and services, mass disbursements and remittances. Of the three, remittances show the strongest jump in perceived demand, especially by respondents who are in or near production with blockchain technology for payments.
However, around 35% of the respondents expressed concerns about the difficulty of integrating blockchain and digital assets, while 28% think integration is too expensive. The participants of the survey were concerned with regulatory issues: 35% say regulations are too uncertain, and 32% believe they’re too prohibitive.
The survey was not targeted at Ripple customers. However, it weighed responses on the basis of the total in and outflow of remittances at the country level. The survey was an effort to “have a country mix that represented the addressable market for blockchain in payments.”