Ripple CEO Wants To Take Over SWIFT’s Customers — Centrals Banks Tap In

[Ben Graham]

Ripple’s ambitions in the global payments space have grown louder and more direct, as its CEO Brad Garlinghouse, openly stated at APEX 2025 that the company is aiming to take over SWIFT’s customer base. The commentary follows Ripple’s long-term strategy to shift global banking infrastructure away from legacy systems to the blockchain-based XRP Ledger. Meanwhile, central banks are increasingly taking note, with recent reports revealing that the capacity of Ripple’s network is currently being studied alongside SWIFT’s systems in experiments.

Garlinghouse Sets Sights On SWIFT’s Market Share

Speaking at the APEX summit, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse declared that Ripple’s goal is not only to compete with SWIFT but to replace its role in moving money on the global scale. According to Garlinghouse, although SWIFT is very dominant in messaging, the most important thing is the liquidity that banks can provide. 

“I think less about the messaging and more about liquidity,” he said. Ripple is targeting this deeper infrastructure among banks, which is the actual movement of value. Interestingly, 

Garlinghouse asserted that Ripple plans to capture up to 14% of SWIFT’s current cross-border volume within five years. That’s a bold number, especially considering the scale at which SWIFT currently operates. Recent estimates show that SWIFT currently facilitates more than 45 million financial messages and handles around $5 trillion in money transfers daily. Even a 14% share of that market would represent hundreds of billions of dollars in value flowing through Ripple’s ecosystem, which would create a significant demand for XRP in the process.

Central Banks Are Tapping In

Garlinghouse’s comments come at a time when institutional momentum appears to be shifting in Ripple’s favor. Interestingly, Ripple’s global push is not limited to private sector partnerships. A crypto enthusiast on the social media platform X known as Finance Bull recently drew attention to growing central bank interest in blockchain-based payment infrastructure. Unsurprisingly, Ripple’s technology is the key focus to this growing interest. 

Ripple’s xCurrent solution, which is built on the Interledger Protocol (ILP), was recently studied alongside SWIFT’s gpi system as part of Project Stella. Project Stella is a collaborative research initiative by the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan.

Basically, what this means is that central banks are starting to look into Ripple’s technology, which says a lot about the ecosystem’s outlook in the coming years. The fact that two of the world’s most influential central banks reviewed Ripple’s infrastructure alongside SWIFT is a signal that XRP’s utility is now being evaluated at the core of global monetary policy discussions.

These developments closely align with what many fervent XRP supporters have long believed. There have been recurring predictions among the community’s most confident voices that XRP’s price is destined to move far beyond its current all-time high of $3.40. Some technical analyses have predicted double-digit prices for XRP. Other predictions for the XRP price are as high as $1,000.