On Friday (November 8), at Ripple’s Swell conference in Singapore, MoneyGram Chairman and CEO Alex Holmes talked about his company’s use of Ripple’s XRP-powered On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) product, which used to be called xRapid, for cross-border payments.

Ripple’s Partnership With MoneyGram

Californian FinTech company Ripple announced on June 17 that it entered into a strategic partnership with MoneyGram, one of the world’s largest money transfer companies. Here is how Ripple’s blog post explained the deal:

Through this partnership, which will have an initial term of two years, Ripple would become MoneyGram’s key partner for cross-border payment and foreign exchange settlement using digital assets. In conjunction with the partnership, Ripple has agreed to provide a capital commitment to MoneyGram, which enables the company to draw up to $50 million in exchange for equity over a two-year period.

Holmes, MoneyGram’s CEO, said at the time:

Through Ripple’s xRapid product, we will have the ability to instantly settle funds from US dollars to destination currencies on a 24/7 basis, which has the potential to revolutionize our operations and dramatically streamline our global liquidity management.

Then, on August 2, during his company’s Q2 2019 Earnings Call, Holmes said that MoneyGram had started “transacting on the Ripple xRapid platform”

Three months later, during MoneyGram’s Q3 2019 Earnings Call, which took place on November 1, once again, the MoneyGram CEO had some exciting news to report about his company’s partnership with Ripple:

Today, we've integrated Ripple onto our standard Treasury process to execute foreign currency trades 24/7. Over the quarter, we've continued to increase our usage of Ripple’s on-demand liquidity product for a portion of our daily funding needs in Mexico.

MoneyGram CEO’s Comments at the Swell 2019 Conference

As Ripple reported earlier today (November 8), on day two of the two-day Swell 2019 conference in Singapore, Holmes talked to Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse about MoneyGram’s experience with using Ripple’s ODL product for cross-border transactions.

First, Holmes talked about the global remittance market:

What has amazed me the most is the amount of pressure that legacy players face.The fundamental challenge of moving money around the world is that there isn’t a lot of coordination between financial institutions and there should be more solutions to connect all of these pieces. More and more companies are looking to make the economy move like it should.

Next, the MoneyGram CEO talked about how his company’s innovations lab is helping MoneyGram explore the use of emerging technologies for improving the company’s services:

We’re migrating our legacy systems to the cloud and looking at how we can use blockchain distributed ledger technology to improve our core systems.

His most interesting comments though were about Ripple’s ODL product, which uses XRP as a bridge currency for cross-border payments:

What I love about ODL is that we’re completely at the forefront of this technology … We’re able to settle billions of dollars in seconds. The magic really comes from pairing MoneyGram transactions with Ripple’s ODL.

According to Ripple, the MoneyGram CEO also announced on stage at Swell 2019 that “the company is currently moving 10% of its transaction volume through ODL between the United States and Mexican borders and planned to expand into four more corridors by the end of this year.”

Featured Image Courtesy of MoneyGram