Ripple’s managing director of South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa says the company’s cross-border payment solution xCurrent gives banks and financial institutions a huge cost savings over Swift.
In a new interview with The Asian Banker, Navin Gupta says the Brazil-based cross-border payment company BeeTech managed to eliminate Swift fees for all of its remittance corridors, “dropping in its own fees from $20 to $2 per transaction in the process.”
Gupta says he’s seeing a tipping point in adoption of Ripple’s cross-border payment solutions, noting an increasing number of “progressive” banks and financial institutions jumping on board with Ripple.
“There is a very significant amount of movement from High Street banks to join the network and we believe at different points in their lifecycle they will make this decision.”
Ripple now has more than 200 companies on its network, with new companies joining every week.
“Every one of those 200 financial institutions, of which 50% are from Asia and the Middle East, are production ready and are in the process of going live. It took us two years to acquire the first 100 customers but it took only one year to acquire the next 100. Existing customers are using us more by leveraging our multiple corridors, and the network effect is really starting to take off.”
As for Ripple’s xRapid, which utilizes XRP to boost liquidity, Gupta says the company’s push for increasing regulatory clarity on digital assets around the world is what’s needed to bring more banks and financial institutions on board. He says XRP is poised to give international companies a new way to move money without having to hold large sums of cash in banks around the world.
“The biggest cost is holding local currencies in making payout possible. Banks keep a large pre-funding amount of beneficiary currencies which translates into a higher cost of capital and depreciation risk that increases the cost per transaction.”
Ripple launched xRapid for commercial production in October. A total of 13 companies are confirmed to be on board.
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