Ripple Partners with MoneyGram for Cross Border Payments
Days after the launch of Visa’s cross border payment system, MoneyGram has partnered with Ripple to facilitate cross border payments with XRP. Ripple has agreed to provide $50 million in exchange for equity over two years, June 17, 2019.
Seamless Cross Border Transactions
Ripple has been making steady progress by partnering with a number of banks and financial institutions to help facilitate international transactions within seconds at a meager cost. The company has focused on strengthening partnerships and setting up pilots with large banks across the globe.
The partnership will focus on xRapid, one of Ripple’s payment processing networks that works by reducing reliance on funding with the use of the highly-liquid and speedy XRP token.
A transaction from Swiss francs to USD would involve the francs being converted to XRP tokens and the tokens, in turn, being converted to USD. By leveraging the XRP’s fungibility, international payments, including multiple currencies, will be multitudes faster considering the drastic fee reduction.
MoneyGram Chairman Alex Holmes said the following about the partnership:
“Through Ripple’s xRapid product, we will have the ability to instantly settle funds from US dollars to destination currencies on a 24/7 basis, which has the potential to revolutionize our operations and dramatically streamline our global liquidity management.”
What this Means for Ripple
Ripple may not be as decentralized as Bitcoin, but its ability to facilitate transactions is second to none. The speed and fees of the network coupled with their vision of revolutionizing the formal payments sector, makes them a formidable opponent to the likes of Visa who are utilizing a permissioned network with a distributed information flow.
The global remittance market is worth around $600 billion, with MoneyGram operating 20 major countries.
While the remittance service provider currently relies on traditional foreign exchange markets, their partnership with Ripple could prove to be a quicker and cheaper alternative.
