BBVA bank responds to Ripple leak controversy
Finder has just heard back from BBVA, the bank at the centre of last week’s Ripple scandal involving an ex-employee with some damaging claims.
Ripple is on the up. The up, up and up. In the last 24-hours it has reached an all-time high with both its market cap and its value. In fact, it’s grown over 30% in the time this writer went to sleep last night and woke up this morning. This rise is before its arrival on Coinbase, too, with predictions the value of XRP will double as a result. If there has been one bleep on the radar at all in Ripple's recent rise, it happened earlier this week.
Finder published the Ripple leak controversy story at the turn of the year and it gained a lot of attention. It involved a former Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) employee’s claims that Ripple wasn’t fit for purpose to replace traditional wire transfers at the bank. BBVA is a large Spanish bank with branches all over the world. This former employee – who is said to have left the company in July 2017 – claimed that he was involved in internal beta tests at BBVA where Ripple was used as an intermediary to exchange currencies across borders.
List of exchanges that allow you to buy Ripple
This is Ripple’s primary goal. The cryptocurrency wants to become the de facto choice for international money exchanges, offering much lower fees and exceptionally fast transfers over the means traditionally used by banks. If Ripple isn’t able to achieve this goal, then it will likely lose a significant part of its competitive edge as a cryptocurrency. So if true, the claims were damaging.
In the days following the Ripple leak controversy, the ex-employee at the centre of the story deleted his posts from Twitter. At one stage he even turned his account to private mode. So was it genuine, if misguided, commentary from someone in the know? If so, was it too outdated to be relevant anyway? Or was it all just a bit of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) sowed into Ripple’s community in the hope of lowering its value slightly ahead of an expected price surge?
What did BBVA say about the Ripple leak controversy?
At the time of writing the initial story, BBVA was approached for its side of the story. Today a response was receive from a member of the bank’s communications strategy team. The spokesperson was keen to point out that they couldn’t confirm who the individual who made the damaging statements was, and noted that the tweets had been removed. They also gave an assurance that the tweets did not reflect BBVA’s views and were not official statements. Instead, the official response is below in full:
“BBVA conducted a real life implementation of Ripple's technology last year, sending money between Europe and Mexico, and the results demonstrated just how significantly distributed ledger technology could positively impact financial services. BBVA is continuing to work with Ripple, as well as a number of others working in the blockchain sector such as Ethereum and Hyperledger, as this technology develops and builds out into new solutions." - BBVA spokesperson, communications strategy team
So there you have it. We appreciate BBVA coming forward and making an official statement in response to the claims detailed by the alleged former employee going by the handle OB. We have no reason to not take this official statement at face value. We have also updated the initial Ripple leak controversy story to reflect this statement.
