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South American countries have recently seen a huge wave of Bitcoin adoption and increased access to cryptocurrencies through a new partnership between a major South American banking firm and the Bitex cryptocurrency exchange.
According to Coindesk:
“A leading bank technology provider in Latin America is partnering with cryptocurrency exchange Bitex to facilitate cross-border payments over the bitcoin blockchain. Bantotal is a core banking service provider based in Uruguay that services over 60 different financial institutions across 14 different countries.
According to a Bantotal spokesperson, an estimated 20 million people use Bantotal’s money management services. The partnership means that Bantotal clients will be able to access Bitex services in a marketplace of other traditional financial services that Bantotal offers through its BDevelopers program.”
This is a very significant development as it is giving a huge number of customers access to exciting new payment methods, methods that will go on to encourage the use of cryptocurrencies for international payments between countries in which these 60 financial institutions operate. Bitex will work within this new partnership to actually facilitate the transfer of FIAT currencies and cryptocurrencies. In essence, Bitex exists as a middleman that will actually handle the exchange process, so the banks involved won’t need to handle the cryptocurrency as such.
This is a great example of how cryptocurrency exchange can operate on an institutional level. Banks and financial service providers can use cryptocurrencies and make the most of the efficiency of the blockchain, without actually having to invest in crypto themselves, that’s a very exciting prospect and it’s great to see this in practice across South America. Hopefully, this starts to develop some very new and exciting movements for cryptocurrency adoption across countries like Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina.
According to Coindesk, Lisa Nestor, director of partnerships at the Stellar Foundation believes that this is a very exciting partnership, one that could have a big impact on Stellar in the future too. She commented:
“We think this announcement further validates the value financial institutions are recognizing in digital assets and distributed ledger technology for executing core banking activities, like international payments. It’s also no coincidence these product partnerships are being launched in the [Latin American] market where cross-border payments, even in neighboring nations, can be slow and expensive.”
Thanks to services like Bitex, the adoption of cryptocurrency across huge areas is achievable and is becoming more and more common by the day. It’s great to see traditional financial companies getting on board too - all of this is great for our industry.
Article produced by Robert Johnson
https://cryptodaily.co.uk/2019/08/huge-wave-of-bitcoin-adoption-in-south-america
