Saudi Arabia’s Riyad Bank is exploring blockchain-based financial infrastructure through a collaboration between its innovation and technology arm Jeel and Ripple. The initiative covers cross-border payments, digital asset custody and tokenization as the bank examines how blockchain technology could be applied to financial services.
The partnership is part of a broader shift among financial institutions toward testing digital assets through controlled environments rather than immediately deploying them across core banking operations. Jeel and Ripple’s work includes proofs of concept through a regulatory sandbox, allowing potential applications to be evaluated before any wider rollout.
Riyad Bank Explores Three Blockchain Use Cases
Cross-border payments are one of the central areas being examined. Banks traditionally rely on networks of correspondent institutions and prefunded accounts to move money internationally, creating opportunities for blockchain-based systems to reduce settlement friction and improve transaction visibility.
Ripple has built its institutional product suite around several of these use cases. The company says its infrastructure covers cross-border payments, digital asset custody, stablecoin payments and tokenized asset issuance, with products designed to connect to existing banking and treasury systems.
The custody component is equally significant as banks assess how to hold and manage digital assets for institutional customers. Ripple’s custody platform provides infrastructure for private-key management, governance and transaction controls, with deployment options including multiparty computation and hardware security modules.
Tokenization represents the third major area of exploration. Financial institutions are increasingly examining whether bonds, funds and other financial assets can be represented on blockchain networks, potentially creating new methods for issuance, distribution, settlement and record keeping.
For Riyad Bank, testing these functions through Jeel provides a way to examine the technology without assuming that every proposed use case will ultimately reach commercial deployment. The partnership is therefore better understood as an exploration of infrastructure than as confirmation of a full-scale digital asset launch.
One important distinction concerns XRP. The collaboration with Ripple does not by itself establish that Riyad Bank will use XRP for settlement. The available announcements and reporting identify Ripple’s blockchain technology and the three areas of exploration but do not confirm XRP or RLUSD as required assets for the initiative.
Saudi Arabia Expands Its Digital Finance Experiments
The initiative comes as Saudi Arabia continues to examine different forms of digital financial infrastructure. The Saudi Central Bank previously participated in the mBridge wholesale CBDC project and completed its proof of concept in May 2025. Its departure from the project became public in September 2026, with the central bank describing its participation as a completed experiment.
The timing has drawn attention because Riyad Bank’s separate work with Ripple focuses on some of the same broad challenges around international settlement. However, available evidence does not establish that Saudi Arabia’s mBridge exit was caused by, or intended to be replaced by, the Riyad Bank-Ripple collaboration.
Saudi Arabia has previous experience testing Ripple technology. The Saudi Central Bank worked with Ripple in 2018 on a pilot that allowed local banks to experiment with blockchain-based cross-border payments. The latest initiative therefore builds on an existing history of blockchain experimentation in the country’s financial sector.
For Ripple, the Riyad Bank relationship adds another institutional connection in a region where banks and financial authorities are examining tokenization, digital custody and alternative settlement infrastructure. Ripple’s own 2026 research has also highlighted growing institutional interest in tokenization and digital asset custody among banks and asset managers.
For Riyad Bank, however, the immediate objective is testing rather than announcing a completed production deployment. The eventual outcome will depend on regulatory requirements, technical performance, commercial demand and the results of the proofs of concept.
The collaboration gives the Saudi banking sector another opportunity to evaluate how blockchain could fit alongside existing financial infrastructure. Whether that eventually leads to commercial cross-border payment services, institutional custody products or tokenized financial assets remains to be determined, but the partnership places those use cases inside a live institutional testing environment.
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