CGI, a Canadian IT consulting company, has announced that it is the first commercial enterprise to implement the Ripple Validator Node which will provide banking clients with a trusted network partner for Ripple's blockchain technology that settles domestic and cross-border transactions in real-time.

“CGI is at the forefront of payments modernization, and our partnership with Ripple provides added value to our clients. We are excited to continue to expand our use of distributed financial technology to help banks reduce implementation risks and shorten time to value,” Pamela Smith, Vice-President of CGI’s Financial Solutions Group said.

According to the official release, the announcement follows the recent release of CGI’s Ripple-enabled Intelligent Gateway. The Gateway provides a solution-agnostic, transformational wrapper around a client’s payment processing systems. It is one of the first payments solutions in the industry to integrate Ripple’s distributed ledger technology.

“Given our ongoing efforts to further decentralize the Ripple network, we couldn’t be more excited for CGI to implement a validator. Having a major enterprise player contribute to the consensus process on Ripple fortifies the resiliency of the network, and it plays a key role in our work with CGI to make it even easier to put blockchain technology into commercial production,” Asheesh Birla, VP of Product at Ripple said.

CGI was found in 1976 and leverages a comprehensive portfolio of services including high-end business and IT consulting, systems integration, application development and maintenance, infrastructure management as well as 150 IP-based services and solutions.