Ripple’s senior vice president of product management and corporate development Asheesh Birla says the San Francisco-based payments startup plans to open up new XRP remittance corridors this year.
Ripple’s XRP-powered cross-border payments service, On-Demand Liquidity (ODL), has already made some splashes in certain avenues of the institutional remittance industry, particularly along the US-Mexico corridor.
The Ripple executive says the company is en route to linking new countries to ODL in 2020.
“Ripple is on track to open new ODL corridors this year and we’re onboarding new customers and working with existing customers to ramp up ODL volume in important corridors including USD-MXN, USD-PHP, AUD-USD and PHP, and from EUR-USD.”
It remains unclear which countries or corridors Ripple plans to target in the short term. But the payments firm noted in February that it is working on adding new corridors in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America.
As consumers and businesses adapt to the new norm, Birla cautions that ODL volume could look different in a world struggling with the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We are continuing to focus on supporting low-value, high-frequency payments with ODL—though transaction volume may look different in this new world.
In particular, we are reducing emphasis on large treasury payments—which are traditionally used to fund businesses and services in the absence of real-time transfers—to support individual, low-value transactions, addressing the growing need in remittances and SME payments. This may reduce overall ODL transaction volumes.”
