Ripple Hits Customer Milestone, Eyes X-Border Payments Disruption

Ripple, the blockchain company that has the XRP digital currency, reached a milestone on Tuesday (Jan. 8) by reaching 200 customers.

According to a blog post, Ripple said that in addition to the 200 customers, it has seen a 350 percent increase in customers who are sending live payments over its blockchain platform. The company announced that 13 new financial institutions, including Euro Exim Bank, SendFriend, JNFX, FTCS, Al Ahli Bank of Kuwait, Transpaygo, BFC Bahrain, ConnectPay, GMT, WorldCom Finance, Olympia Trust Company, Pontual/USEND and Rendimento have joined its payment network.

The company noted that JNFX, SendFriend, Transpaygo, FTCS and Euro Exim Bank will leverage XRP, its digital token, to source liquidity on demand when sending payments on behalf of their customers. Ripple said that using XRP for liquidity when sending a cross-border payment helps financial firms avoid the need to pre-fund accounts in the destination currencies and enables them to make faster and cheaper payments.

“In 2018, nearly 100 financial institutions joined RippleNet, and we’re now signing two — sometimes three — new customers per week. We also saw a 350 percent increase last year in customers sending live payments, and we’re beginning to see more customers flip the switch and leverage XRP for on-demand liquidity,” said Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, in the blog post. “At the end of the day, our goal is to make sure our customers can provide excellent, efficient cross-border payments experiences for their customers, wherever they are in the world.”

In an interview with CNBC, Garlinghouse said Ripple is now in more than 40 countries and has plans to expand further. As it stands, it has a lot of work to do if it wants to make a real impact on the global payments market, which is still under the control of the world’s largest banks.

While Ripple is seen as a crypto play, that is not its most popular product. CNBC reported that xCurrent, the software that lets Ripple work with the existing infrastructure of banks to settle payments in a speedy manner, is its most widely used service. Its crypto product xRapid, which went live in the fall, uses cryptocurrency as a bridge between foreign currencies, the CEO told CNBC.