Ripple is cranking up its assault on Swift by signing up big names Ben Bernanke and Tim Berners-Lee for a conference next month, which will take place at the same time and in the same city, Toronto, as the annual Sibos jamboree.
The Ripple Conference, called Swell: The Future is Here, will run from the 16th to 18th of October at Airship37 in downtown Toronto, just a couple of miles from Sibos, which runs from the 16th to 19th of the same month at the Metro Conference Centre.
Former Federal Reserve chairman Bernanke and World Wide Web inventor Berners-Lee will speak at the upstart event, which Ripple says will "discuss trends, success stories of blockchain implementations and real-world blockchain use cases to meet changing customer demands for global payments".
The timing, location and "Swell: the future is here" name are no coincidence, representing an escalation of Ripple's recent assault on the venerable Swift network.
Ripple has positioned itself as the upstart rival to Swift, boasting that its distributed financial technology can help banks slash the time and cost of settlement while enabling new types of high-volume, low-value global transactions.
Swift responded to the threat with its gpi programme, which launched in February and comprises a range of service level agreements intended to improve the customer experience in correspondent banking by increasing the speed, transparency and predictability of cross-border payments.
Ripple used last year's Sibos to fire off a series of barbed tweets and acerbic commentary asking if the interbank co-operative's set-piece initiative is all it's cracked up to be.
Swift played down the antics, insisting that it had cordial relations with its young rival, but earlier this year Ripple poached the business director for the gpi programme, Marjan Delatinne.
Much like the organisations, the conferences will see a smaller upstart take on a long-established giant. Sibos has been running for nearly 40 years and will gather more than 8000 people together, with RBC chief Dave McKay lined up to deliver the opening address.