According to CoinDesk, Metaco, a Swiss digital assets custody firm acquired by Ripple earlier this year, is working with HSBC, one of the world's largest banks. This collaboration has been seen as a positive sign by supporters of Ripple's ledger protocol, known as the XRP army, who believe that financial institutions will adopt XRPL and the XRP token. However, it should be noted that Metaco had been courting HSBC for over 18 months before the acquisition, according to Adrien Treccani, Metaco's CEO.
Treccani states that there is an indirect correlation between Ripple protocols and Metaco's banking clients. The adoption of Ripple and Metaco's solutions promotes the adoption of XRPL as a protocol. Ripple has focused on reducing friction in areas like cross-border payments, making XRPL one of the longest-running examples of a private tokenization blockchain. Combining Metaco and Ripple offers a complete vertical stack, including an infrastructure layer and a services layer, which can provide banks with the necessary infrastructure, tokenization life cycle, payments primitives, and liquidity management.
Following the acquisition of Metaco, there were rumors that some banking customers were considering taking their business elsewhere due to Ripple's dispute with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Treccani dismissed these speculations as 'crazy' and stated that post-acquisition discussions and reassessments by clients are normal. He also mentioned that more tier one bank partnerships will be announced soon in Europe, the U.S., APAC, and Africa. As banks like HSBC join the trend towards tokenization, Treccani believes that many banks will eventually offer cryptocurrency-related services, and building for tokenization now will prepare these institutions for cryptocurrency entry when the time comes.