Fast & Seamless: The Race for the Cross-Border Payments Market

Operating on the Stellar blockchain, the new financial rail will provide an infrastructure for clearing and settling cross-border payments with finality "In near real-time," at the same time reducing transaction costs by removing third-party intermediaries from the process.

IBM and Stellar were first spotted jointly developing cross-border financial solutions in October 2017, when they unveiled a plan to build a transaction infrastructure for the South Pacific region alongside KlickEx, a New Zealand-based payments network.

Finally, in July, IBM announced the launch of Stronghold USD, a U.S. dollar-pegged stable coin run on the Stellar network, in a partnership with financial services provider Stronghold.

IBM also stresses that the new financial rail is built to integrate seamlessly with existing payments systems through its API, so banks won't have to implement sweeping hardware changes in order to start using it.

Even before setting out to explore the territory that is usually considered within Ripple's jurisdiction - transactional services for large corporate banks - Stellar was doomed to have all its achievements measured against those of its older sibling.

Unlike Ripple, Stellar is completely open-source and not beholden to a single corporate entity.

While Ripple has long been seen mainly as a solution provider for banks, Stellar developed a reputation of being a payment network for individuals.

Ripple's brisk ascent to the rank of the third largest crypto asset by market capitalization at the turn of last year has been largely predicated on a streak of successful pitches of its services to major financial institutions.

Judging from what is known about Blockchain World Wire at this point, the system's design and functionality directly pit it against Ripple's xRapid rail in the race for global banks' good graces.

It is worth noting that the market of cross-national, blockchain-powered financial services is far from a duopolistic arrangement divided solely between Ripple and BWW. In late June, Ant Financial, Alibaba's financial arm, deployed a remittance solution on blockchain to facilitate transactions between Hong Kong and the Philippines.