Ripple and BNY Mellon Explore XRP Ledger Trade Finance for Approved Invoices

Ripple’s expanded work with BNY Mellon puts a practical test case behind institutional blockchain plans: financing approved supplier invoices on the XRP Ledger. The proposal links a familiar business asset—an invoice a buyer has approved—to a newer method for moving and recording value. If the effort advances, suppliers could receive funds in seconds while keeping their existing invoice terms and repayment dates. That’s the pitch; the partners are still examining how the arrangement would work in practice.

BNY expands its Ripple custody role

Announced Tuesday, the expanded partnership brings XRP and Ripple’s dollar-backed stablecoin, RLUSD, to BNY’s institutional custody platform. BNY already holds the reserves backing RLUSD and has a custody relationship with Ripple Prime. The next step under discussion would let BNY clients mint and redeem RLUSD through the bank. That would extend the bank’s role from holding assets and reserves toward supporting activity around the stablecoin, though the proposed client service hasn’t been presented as a completed offering.

For institutions, custody is an essential piece of handling digital assets, but it doesn’t by itself explain what those assets are useful for. A bank can safeguard tokens while clients still lack a clear way to use them in ordinary financing or payments. Ripple and BNY are trying to connect those pieces: custody on one side, and possible use in capital markets and trade finance on the other. Whether the connection proves useful will depend on the details of the services and the appetite of businesses to use them.

Ripple President Monica Long framed the effort as a move from issuing digital representations of assets to using them in financial activity. “We’re moving past the initial issuance of assets onchain — now, it’s all about making these tokenized assets usable for payments and collateral across financial markets,” she said. The distinction is consequential. Creating a token can show that an asset has been represented on a ledger; using it for payments or as collateral requires counterparties, operating processes, and confidence that the arrangement works when money is due.

That shift matters because custody alone leaves institutions holding assets without necessarily putting them to work. Ripple and BNY say they’re building infrastructure to support their use in capital markets and trade finance through the XRP Ledger. This is more significant than it looks if the effort can link a bank’s existing institutional role to a transaction companies already understand. But infrastructure claims are still claims until customers can complete the intended activity at a useful scale.

Invoice financing is the proposed use case

Ripple and BNY are also working with C2FO, a working capital platform, to examine tokenized trade finance for supply chain receivables. The concept would put approved invoices on public blockchain infrastructure and connect suppliers with capital providers willing to finance payments. An approved invoice gives the parties a defined payment obligation to work from; tokenization would represent that claim digitally and could make it easier to coordinate the financing process across participants.

The idea addresses a familiar cash-flow problem. A supplier may have completed work and received approval for an invoice but still have to wait for the buyer’s scheduled payment date. Financing can bring cash forward, while the buyer keeps the agreed terms. In principle, a shared digital record could help participants track the invoice and the related transaction. Similar systems typically still depend on clear processes for confirming the underlying claim and handling exceptions, so the ledger alone can’t settle every operational question.

Under the proposed arrangement, suppliers could receive funds within seconds instead of waiting days for conventional bank transfers to clear. The financing wouldn’t change the invoice’s original terms or repayment deadline. That makes the model a potential way to speed access to working capital while preserving familiar payment arrangements; the partners are still exploring the approach. The promised speed concerns the movement of funds, however, and doesn’t establish how quickly an invoice would be approved, matched with a capital provider, or resolved if the parties disputed it.

Here’s the thing: faster settlement is only one part of the supplier’s experience. The financing also has to be accessible, understandable, and worth using alongside existing options. If you’re working in this space, the question is whether the process reduces friction across the full transaction, rather than simply moving the final payment faster. And this is the part most people overlook: the invoice remains a business claim between parties, even when a token represents it.

RLUSD and XRPL provide the operating context

RLUSD, which launched in December 2024, has reached about $2.5 billion in market capitalization, with more than $1 billion issued on the XRP Ledger. Ripple reports that XRPL has processed over 4.6 billion transactions and settles transfers in three to five seconds. Those figures help explain the ledger’s appeal for payment and financing experiments. They describe the network and the stablecoin’s current footprint, though they don’t establish how the proposed invoice service will perform in practice.

That gap between network activity and a specific commercial service matters. A ledger can process transfers quickly, but a trade finance product also needs participants to agree on which invoices qualify, how funds are supplied, and how payment obligations are tracked. The announcement identifies a possible use case and names the partners examining it; it doesn’t provide results from a live invoice financing program. The numbers here are useful context, but they’re not evidence that suppliers are already receiving faster funding through this arrangement.

What the experiment needs to prove

The BNY collaboration is part of a wider run of Ripple announcements ahead of its annual Swell event. The company has also said the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency gave final approval to its proposed national trust bank, a development CEO Brad Garlinghouse had previously announced. Together, these announcements point to Ripple’s effort to build a broader institutional presence around digital assets, custody, and financial services. The trade finance proposal gives that strategy a concrete business problem to address.

That said, the initiative’s significance rests on execution, not the vocabulary of tokenization. The partners will need to show that approved invoices can be represented and financed in a way that works for suppliers, capital providers, and the institutions involved. They’ll also need to make clear how the digital record fits with the underlying payment terms. Until those practical details are demonstrated, the proposal remains a test of whether tokenized assets can connect institutional custody to faster, usable business funding.

A promising concept. Still unproven.