RIPPLE, which provides enterprise blockchain solutions for payments, sees Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, as a priority market to expand its blockchain technology for cross-border payments and remittances.
“Next, we want to do is expand our networks further into local clearing, and also link the Southeast Asian markets much more tightly with other countries around the world where Ripple is available, so we want to increase the number of countries where people can send money to Southeast Asia from and to number of people than can send money to,” Marcus Treacher, senior vice-president at Ripple, said in a phone interview with BusinessWorld on Jan. 17.
“We also want to create a very powerful, very effective payment network for individuals remitting money to each other and small companies, start-up companies sending and receiving international payments from each other,” he said.
Ripple provides frictionless transactions to send money from one country to another à Ripple ensures the sending of money from one country to another through frictionless transactions. Member institutions can process their customers’ payments anywhere in an instant.
“What Ripple has done is to create a new model… to recreate a model that uses an interconnecting technology which uses some blockchain technology to enable ledgers that will hold money in one country to be connected to ledgers in another country,” Mr. Treacher said.
Aside from being platform for remitting money from one point to another, Ripple also addressed the problem of liquidity through their digital asset XRP by removing the hassle of having to pre-fund accounts in destination currencies.
“When we look at the task of making a payment between one country and another, you’ve actually got two problems. One problem in getting the payment to somebody in another country efficiently, and another problem is making sure that you have enough money in the foreign currency of that country,” he said.
“At Ripple, we actually address this liquidity as well. So, our payment network using the blockchain element enables payments to move in seconds… we support that with a pure blockchain solution that runs the digital asset, XRP. What we do is we offer XRP as a method for banks and payment companies to put enough liquidity as required into foreign currencies, into foreign countries to support the payment that goes to the Ripple,” he added.
Ripple is currently operating in over 40 countries with over 200 customers globally.
It recently announced a new milestone, in which 13 new financial institutions have signed up for its payment network, RippleNet. The new companies in the platform include Euro Exim bank, SendFriend, JNFX, FTCS, Ahli Bank of Kuwait, and Transpaygo, to name a few. — Vincent Mariel P. Galang
