Rosbank Become The First Russian Bank To Launch A Crypto Cross-border Payment Service

Rosbank confirmed that its new crypto payment service has been tested among corporate & private clients.

Rosbank is a Russian universal bank. In Oct 2020, Rosbank ranked 11th among all the Russian banks in terms of assets management value. In 2021, a report from Forbes Russia noted that Rosbank was the third most reliable Russian bank in the country. 

Recently Rosbank conducted some tests for its global crypto payment services with its corporate & some other private clients. 

Under the bank’s new cross-border payment solution,  first the purchase of cryptocurrencies takes place abroad using the funds of the importer, which are then transferred to the foreign provider.

In the present time, Russia’s fintech firm B-crypto provides the technical infrastructure to allow crypto purchase & sell, as a part of the crypto payment service. So all the country’s businesses are required to go through a KYC process with B-Crypto & Rosbank if they want use this global crypto payment service.

The Vice President of the Russian Banks Association Alexei Voilukov said that Rosbank is the first Russian Bank that is successfully providing cross-border payment services with the help of cryptocurrencies, while several giant banks are still behind in this race. 

Russia, sanction, & crypto adoption 

In Feb 2022, Russia & Ukraine jumped into a war against each other over their geopolitical conflict. The majority of the Western countries supported Ukraine & further imposed several financial & trade sanctions against Russia, to isolate the Russian economy & power away from the world. 

Because of the financial sanctions, several Russian government agencies proposed the idea to adopt cryptocurrencies in the payment services, to bypass the sanctions easily. 

Also, some of the Russian-friendly countries decided to bring a decentralised global currency to bring better payment services to bypass the need for the US dollar, with the help of blockchain technology.

Russian national crypto exchange plan 

To keep bad actors’ activities away from the crypto sector, the Russian government agencies proposed the idea to establish a new Russian national crypto exchange.

Recently the Russian finance ministry opposed the idea & proposed to follow strict measures against local crypto exchanges and also suggested handing over the crypto exchange regulatory authority to the Bank of Russia, the national Central Bank of the country.

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