Ripple, the company that owns the third largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, announced that it wants to strengthen cross-border payments between the United States and Mexico.
To achieve this goal, it allied itself with the International Money Express company, which specializes in the money remittance service. The interesting thing about this company is that it focuses on Latin America and the Caribbean.
This company, also known as Intermex and Ripple’s new financial partner, is listed on the Nasdaq stock market.
Through this new partnership, Intermex could implement Ripple’s liquidity on demand (ODL) product. This would be done through the crypto company’s global payment network, RippleNet, which connects different financial institutions.
But what is the ODL? Well, it’s just an XRP-based product that is used as a real-time bridge for sending and receiving coins. This allows for faster and cheaper cross-border operations.
The remittance market: a new opportunity for Ripple
The remittance market, although not as studied as the variations in the price of cryptocurrencies, is also an important area where they operate.
Using cryptocurrencies such as Ripple helps avoid intermediaries in international transactions. And with this, payments of large sums for commissions generated by these operations are also avoided.
But, although digital currencies can take advantage of this situation, not all of them worry about exposing these advantages to their customers. However, Ripple has been trying to be the main cryptocurrency in this sector for some time. And its association with Intermex is nothing more than proof of that.
This alliance demonstrates Ripple’s interest in expanding its presence in the Mexican remittance market. In addition, it should be noted that the company has already offered its ODL service to the second largest remittance company in the world: MoneyGram International.
But for MoneyGram, working with Ripple is nothing new, since it has worked with the company and with XRP since August 2019.
In fact, in November 2019, Alex Holmes, CEO of MoneyGram, assured that 10% of his company’s businesses between the United States and Mexico were operated through the Ripple ODL.
Add to this the comments of Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, who said MoneyGram using XRP was a bigger business than the Libra Facebook project.
It should be noted that, for Ripple, trying to cover remittances between the United States and Mexico can be a good strategy, as it represents one of the largest remittance markets in the world.
I am a student of International Studies, interested in new technologies and their impact on the world. Faithful believer that tenacity is the basis of success.
