“One Pay FX”, the Ripple-powered cross-border payments app launched by Santander UK, the UK subsidiary of Spanish financial services giant Banco Santander, on 12 April 2018, has achieved a new milestone: the UK–Poland payments corridor has gone live.

As CryptoGlobe reported back in April 2018, this service is powered by Ripple’s xCurrent, “Ripple’s enterprise software solution that enables banks to instantly settle cross-border payments with end-to-end tracking.”

The purpose of this mobile app (currently only available for iOS) to allow Santander customers who have a debit card to complete near-instant international payments across multiple payment corridors.

On July 11, Santander UK released version 1.3.1 of the “One Pay FX” app. This update has enabled the UK-Poland payments corridor, which means that UK customers can now send Zloty (PLN) payments to Poland.

Here is Marcus Treacher, who is the Senior Vice President of Customer Success at Ripple, announced the news on Twitter:

This means that it is now possible for Santander UK’s retail customers to make international payments of up to GBP 10,000 a day in Euros to 19 Euro-zone countrioes, in Dollars to the United States, and in Zloty to Poland.

The exchange rates offered by the app seem pretty good. For example, as you can see in the screenshot embedded in the above tweet, the GBP-PLN rate offered by the app was 4.7481, and at the time of writing (a few hours later after that tweet was sent), the rate being shown by Google is 4.76:

GBP-PLN Rate on 14 July 2019.png

One reviewer (“Jezzie750”) of the app on Apple’s UK App Store wrote the following review in December 2018:

Needed to make a one payment in Euros to a Spanish bank account… Without this app it would have cost me £25 for a quick payment or £15 fir a slower payment. This app did the transfer free!

On 3 April 2019, at Santander’s 2019 Investor Day, the company announced that it planned to expland the “One Pay FX” product and offer “a new open-market international payments service called Pago FX.” This service will let anyone, not just Satnader customer, make interneational payments. In the near future, this service will be launched in Poland, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Back in January 2019, at the Santander International Banking Conference in Madrid, Ana Patricia Botín, the Executive Chairman of the Santander Group, had this to say about the xCurrent-powered One Pay FX app:

You can do FX transfers, real-time, between the UK and continental Europe. And you can actually do Poland, Brazil and Chile – through Santander – for the same cost as Transferwise.

 

Featured Image Courtesy of Ripple