Intermex, which specializes in payments in the United States and Latin America, is one of the companies that recently joined Ripple’s cross-border payments network. In a new earnings call, the remittance provider, which processes over 30 million transactions per year, sheds light on how it plans to leverage Ripple’s services moving forward.
While the Miami-based company does not plan to use Ripple’s technology in its primary corridor between the US and Mexico, chief financial officer Tony Lauro says the company expects to begin testing the viability of XRP as a bridge currency later this year.
“We’re looking at Ripple for a couple of other products which I think we mentioned in the press release. The first of which is RippleNet, which is their hub connecting financial institutions together, which will enable us to onboard new payers faster than we would if we were doing direct connections to each one.
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So that has more applicability for us outside of Mexico, where we’re building out our network into other corridors. But the other would be on-demand liquidity, I think that might be more of what you’re talking about, where we can use XRP as kind of a pivot currency to swap US dollars for pesos, 24/7. And it’s early days, but we would expect to be testing that later this year.”
Intermex CEO Bob Lisy says the company will most likely utilize Ripple’s payment solutions in emerging markets where there is less efficiency and liquidity.
“I think it will bring us more growth in newer markets in places where we’re exploring going into ancillary products, but probably not in our core business because those are really critical where we differentiate ourselves from others, because of the kind of volume we drive and the relationships we’ve built over the years with direct relationships.
Ripple will not be an answer for places like Mexico. We’re very proud about the relationships we have there… We have very tight relationships that strategically [set] plans and objectives with those payers. And so you won’t really see us leveraging Ripple in our core markets.”
Ripple’s XRP-based remittance product, known as On-Demand Liquidity, launched in late 2018. MoneyGram is the largest user of ODL, and says 10% of the transactions on its US-Mexico corridor use the technology.
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