Can 6-Year-old Ripple compete with 45-Year-old Swift, or are they even competing?

In June 2018, the financial times (ft.com) featured an article stating how Ripple is a rival to the cross-border payment giant Swift by promising faster, cheaper and more reliable method for sending cross-border payments across the globe. The article also stated that Swift might also be looking to exploit blockchain technology itself shortly. You can read the article here. Our question is:

Are Ripple & Swift even Competing?

Ripple recently launched its product xRapid in its Swell Conference and claimed that 3 financial institutions, including MercuryFX, have even started using its products. Banks and financial institutions, a majority of which currently use SWIFT for all cross-border transactions might be looking forward to using xRapid now. But some hints in the past few days show that Ripple & Swift might just be working together and looking forward to launching as partners.

Coincidence: XRP price shot up near 21st September, the same day Swift launched its products

SWIFT launched 4 products on 21st September:

(According to their Release Timeline)

1. Alliance Access 7.3

2. Alliance Entry 7.3

3. SwiftNet Link 7.3

4. Alliance Gateway 7.3

XRP price was at a Bull run on 20, 21 September:

Coincidence: Swift & Ripple launching similar products

Coincidently, Swift and Ripple are launching the same products:

SwiftNet <-> RippleNet

SwiftLab <-> Ripple Labs

xRapid and SwiftNet offer instant settlements

Swift just released SWIFTnet, Ripple just released Ripplenet.

Ripple Labs builds solutions, now there’s SwiftLab.

xRapid offers instant settlement, now SWIFTnet offers instant settlement.

The days SWIFTnet was released, XRP shot up in price…. hmmmm #xrpthestandard pic.twitter.com/NKaDNxEokc

— Coin Carter (@CoinCarter) October 3, 2018