Ripple’s senior vice president of product management and corporate development says the payments firm is planning a major expansion of its XRP remittance platform next year.
In a new interview on the Lend Academy Podcast, Asheesh Birla outlines the state of Ripple’s XRP-powered On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) product and what’s planned for the future.
“With the cryptocurrency product, you can send into I believe three destinations around the world. We’re expanding that aggressively in 2020 and 2021…
We are going to continue to expand ODL, On-Demand Liquidity. I mentioned this is in a few countries as destinations. We want to get global coverage of that where possible by the regulators.”
Birla highlights MoneyGram and Azimo as two leading users of ODL.
“The traction has been so good that, you know, 10% of US dollar to Mexico which is the largest corridor in the world for remittances, 10% of that now moves over blockchain technology, digital assets and RippleNet.
So, we’ve made a pretty big dent in that in just a few years after launching. So, this is real. People are using it. It’s far superior compared to the traditional world where there’s tons of excess capital pre-positioned around the world just to facilitate payments which is crazy. That removes a lot of that because now you’re trusting a digital asset. You’re not trusting these large mega banks to move your money.”
Moving forward, Birla says Ripple may focus on e-commerce payments following the recent launch of its new loans platform.
“I think, you know, there are other areas as well as listen, you get lending down, you get payments down that opens up a lot of other, you know, white space for us to innovate in as well. One, in particular, is e-commerce. I think with COVID you’ve seen an explosion in growth of e-commerce.
I don’t think you have the right kind of financial infrastructure to support those kinds of companies so that’s something that I’m really looking forward to in terms of innovating and building for in the upcoming year.”
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