Retail Giant Amazon Can Benefit From Ripple and XRP, Says Cory Johnson

Ripple’s chief market strategist Cory Johnson says retail giants like Amazon could benefit from Ripple’s suite of cross-border payment solutions.

At Cornell’s Entrepreneurship Summit in New York City, Johnson talked about Ripple’s mission to dramatically improve the speed and lower the cost of cross-border payments. When asked where he sees Ripple in 10 years, Johnson said he can see the company’s technology playing a key role in helping some of the world’s biggest companies move money and pay their employees in a timely, efficient and low-cost manner.

“We can look at the $23 trillion dollars that are laying around in nostro and vostro accounts that are sort of set up, waiting for pre-payment, because money is so slow…

Amazon – probably the most capital-efficient company in the history of the world – has a billion dollars laying around in accounts to pay employees somewhere, or to pay a vendor somewhere, because the system of moving money is so slow.

So, I can analyze all that and figure out what that looks like. I can’t imagine what a world looks like in 10 years when you can employ that worker in Bangladesh here from the states. Or a Thai nanny can send money home from Japan to pay her family, to have her family have a truly better standard of living.

In places where an extra $5 a month is a life-changing difference. I can’t really imagine that, but I’m pretty stoked about it…

I think that generally, we’re going to see more people in more companies all over the world be able to do business together, and I think it’s fascinating. It’s not just changing business as it is today. It’s what business might look like in the future. And I think it’s going to be very different.”

Johnson also talked about the role cryptocurrencies like XRP could play in reshaping the current financial system.

“The technology of XRP allows for transactions to happen very fast. The current state of the art in the financial industry for moving money across borders is based on a messaging platform called Swift. Swift was written in 1973 and it’s run by a consortium of thousands of banks with thousands of employees in Belgium. And in order to make any changes to the Swift network you have to get all the disparate pieces of the financial system essentially to agree on it.

So it has not been a home of innovation… And there hasn’t been a technological solution to fix that that has come up until Ripple’s products have arrived. And if it wasn’t for XRP’s technology, you couldn’t really truly exchange value thousands of times in a second, and because of that technology, it’s why it’s able to be so cheap.”