Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
With digital-payments providers emerging all over the world to serve local and international consumers, the search is on for synchronized, standardized networks to transfer funds cross-border. Ripple, the San Francisco-based provider of distributed-ledger payments, says it has the answer, and late last week five payments services overseas signed on to that idea.
FairFX, RationalFX, and Exchange4Free, all based in the United Kingdom, as well as UniPAY in the country of Georgia and Malyasia’s MoneyMatch, agreed to integrate Ripple’s xVia application programming interface for use on the company’s RippleNet network. Ripple says the API enables clients to enter new markets faster, cut operational costs while speeding payments, and gain new visibility end-to-end into payments data.
Much of the current trouble with cross-border payments, particularly from developing markets, is the absence of a standardized, low-cost network alternative, Ripple argues. “All of these customers run into the same problem: building bespoke connections to banks and networks all over the world,” said Asheesh Birla, Ripple’s senior vice president of product, in a statement. “It’s expensive and time-consuming.”
The promise of simplified global access to RippleNet appears to appeal to the company’s new xVia clients. The new API “will allow us to reach more people more efficiently and at a lower cost,” James Hickman, chief commercial officer at FairFX, said in a statement.
Ripple clearly sees bigger developments for RippleNet now that xVia has been introduced. “As RippleNet grows, we’ll continue to add a broad array of payment providers, from telcos and mobile wallets to more traditional financial institutions,” Birla said in a blog post on Ripple’s Web site.
Ripple did not release pricing for transactions using xVia. The company claims more than 100 clients globally. Among its product offerings is its XRP cryptocurrency, which Cambridge Global Payments, a unit of Fleetcor Technologies Inc., said late in February it will use in conjunction with Ripple’s XRapid service to provide on-demand liquidity to international trading partners.
The Litecoin digital currency, meanwhile, gained a boost last week when Wirex, a London-based Bitcoin wallet provider and exchange, said it has added a Litecoin wallet, which allows users to spend their Litecoin through a Wirex Visa debit card. The new wallet service will convert Litecoin into dollars, pounds, or euros, the company said.
Litecoin has a reputation for being faster and less expensive than Bitcoin, and so more amenable to retail spending. “Litecoin looks set to become one of the key [cryptocurrencies] used for daily payments,” Wirex says in a blog post on its Web site.
Some $8.5 billion in Litecoin is in circulation, ranking it seventh among the world’s cryptocurrencies, according to Coinmarketcap.com.
