In a blog post on its website, digital payments company Ripple Labs announced the recent addition of the National Bank of Egypt (NBE) to its list of partners.

According to Ripple, the Egyptian apex bank has signed up for its global payment network RippleNet to aid its remittances.

Egypt, which is ranked one of the top five remittance recipients globally, seeks to use RippleNet’s blockchain infrastructure to enable a faster, cheaper, and more reliable payment network.

Alongside the announcement, Ripple noted that the NBE is also working with United Arab Emirates-based foreign exchange company LuLu International Exchange, enabling it to process expatriate remittances for Egyptians based in the UAE.

Speaking on the development, Group Head for Financial Institutions and Financial Services at the NBE Hesham Elsafty noted the importance of remittances in the Egyptian economy.

According to Elsafty, NBE’s partnership with Ripple is meant to improve the overall efficiency of cross-border payments in the wider market.

The Ripple integration is meant to essentially create a new means to tap into the $24 billion remittance business the country currently boasts of.

Ripple Labs seems to have gotten through the worst of a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) legal case. In a Dec. 2020 subpoena, the SEC alleged that the blockchain firm had intentionally sold unregulated securities to the tune of $1.3 billion to investors in 2013.

The case currently being contested saw the San Francisco firm lose several partnerships with fellow payment processor MoneyGram backing out of a multi-year alliance it signed in 2019.

As though that was not enough, the Ripple network's utility token XRP saw negative price action dropping to a paltry 20 cents in the aftermath of the SEC's public release of the lawsuit.

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse and Chairman Chris Larsen have since questioned the SEC’s regulatory oversight noting that XRP’s capability in digitally transferring value places it in the same fold as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

According to their argument, the large-cap cryptocurrencies have been declared commodities by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and as such, XRP should be given the same treatment.

But the digital ledger tech provider has since seen its fortune improve in the last few months due to several key partnerships.

Ripple Labs announced in a March 3 post that it would be offering a private version of its XRP Ledger payment infrastructure. The innovation, which is geared towards central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), would enable central banks to build, issue, and maintain digital formats of their fiat currencies.

XRP has since surged, given minor victories in the SEC case. It has risen 30% in the last month trading $1.22 in the 24hr chart.

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