Jeonbuk Bank Becomes First Korean Regional Lender to Deploy Ripple Payments

Jeonbuk Bank has become the first regional bank in South Korea to deploy Ripple Payments, extending Ripple’s cross-border infrastructure to corporate customers including exporters, technology companies and online content businesses.

Under the partnership, announced August 18, Jeonbuk Bank will use the platform for international remittances that Ripple says can settle in seconds to minutes and operate around the clock. The announcement positions the service as an alternative to correspondent-bank payment chains that can require multiple intermediaries and take days to complete.

Jeonbuk Bank is the first regional bank in Korea to deploy Ripple Payments, replacing multi-day SWIFT transfers with near real-time, 24/7 cross-border settlement for its business customers. Our third Korean partnership this year, after Kyobo Life Insurance and Kbank, partnering…

— Ripple (@Ripple) August 18, 2026

The companies did not disclose which payment corridors or currencies Jeonbuk Bank will initially support, transaction volumes, customer fees or a commercial rollout schedule. Ripple also did not say that XRP, its RLUSD stablecoin or a Korean won-denominated digital asset would be used to settle the bank’s transfers. The agreement therefore expands Ripple’s institutional payments footprint without establishing a direct new use case for XRP.

Nor does the announcement say Jeonbuk Bank is abandoning SWIFT across its broader international banking operations. The disclosed deployment specifically concerns Ripple Payments for cross-border remittances.

The deal is Ripple’s third partnership with a major Korean financial institution announced in 2026, but each involves a different part of its infrastructure stack.

In April, Kyobo Life Insurance partnered with Ripple to use Ripple Custody for tokenized government bond settlement and explore stablecoin-based payment rails. Later that month, Kbank agreed to deploy Ripple Custody’s wallet-as-a-service infrastructure for institutional digital assets.

Jeonbuk Bank President Park Choon-won described the latest partnership as a potential new growth engine for the lender. The next material detail will be how the bank implements the service in production—including the first corridors and settlement assets it chooses to support.