Despite the SEC Lawsuit: Ripple Partners With Egypt’s National Bank

While Ripple continues with its ongoing legal battle against the SEC in the US, the payment processor has partnered with Egypt’s largest and oldest bank – the NBE. By utilizing RippleNet and the financial service provider LuLu, the National Bank of Egypt will process cross-border payments from the UAE to the African country.

Ripple Brings Together UAE and Egypt

Ripple and the NBE have doubled down on their relationship after signing an initial deal in February 2020. At the time, both parties planned to employ Ripple’s network of institutional payment providers called RippleNet to enhance remittance payments.

The blockchain-based payment processor announced the latest deal with Egypt’s oldest bank on May 19th. It sees the involvement of a third party – the UAE-based financial service provider LuLu International Exchange, which is a part of the LuLu Financial Group.

Thus, the three organizations will enable cross-border payments from the United Arab Emirates to Egypt. The latter is the fifth largest remittance recipient after India, China, Mexico, and the Phillippines, with over $24 billion such payments last year alone.

“NBE’s partnership with Ripple will help to improve overall efficiency by enabling NBE to establish new alliances across wider markets with reduced cost and quicker integration time. We are very excited to announce our new partnership with Ripple and LuLu, which we believe will contribute to a further acceleration of the Egypt-UAE remittances corridor,” – commented NBE’s Group Head for Financial Institutions and International Financial Services – Hesham Elsafty.

Ripple’s Battle With the SEC

Although the payment processor continues expanding its services outside of the US, the company is actually facing a lawsuit within the nation it’s based in.

The Securities and Exchange Commission brought charges against Ripple in December 2020 for conducting an unregistered security offering. Since then, their case saw several developments, most of which were actually going in Ripple’s case.

In the span of a week in April, the Court firstly allowed Ripple to receive access to SEC’s internal discussions about Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH). Shortly after, the Court sided with the company once more by ordering the Commission to withdraw its six subpoenas sent to banks requesting personal financial information from firm executives.