On Tuesday (February 4), money transfer company International Money Express (aka “Intermex”) announced that it had partnered with Californian FinTech company Ripple in order to use the latter’s global payment network RippleNet and the XRP-powered On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) service.
RippleNet is Ripple’s global payment network, which has as its members 300+ financial institutions across 40+ countries spanning six continents. RippleNet members are able to make transparent, fast, and inexpensive cross-border, cross-currency payments to each other.
Although RippleNet members do not need to use ODL service, which uses the digital asset XRP as the bridge currency for cross-currency payments, doing so results in additional cost and time savings, as confirmed by Ripple’s existing ODL users, such as MoneyGram.
Here is a diagram from Ripple’s website that illustrates how ODL uses XRP:
Miami-headquartered Intermex is a money transfer services company that was founded in 1994. It specializes in the Latin America and Caribbean payment corridors.
Intermex CEO Bob Lisy commented:
We are pleased to have begun the partnership with the Ripple team, and look forward to implementing new solutions on RippleNet and ODL to help drive growth and deliver greater efficiency.
According to Ripple’s blog post, this partnership will allow Intermex to “settle key currencies and match the timing of funding with its settlement requirements reducing costs and providing transparency to their customers.”
Ripple also gives us a status update on ODL:
Today, ODL is available in corridors including: USD-MXN, USD-PHP, AUD-USD and PHP, and from EUR-USD. Plans for additional corridors across APAC, EMEA and LATAM are in progress for 2020.
The news of the partnership seems to have helped the price of XRP to surge around 12%.
According to CryptoCompare, at press time, XRP is trading at $0.2787, up 11.21% in the past 24-hour period:
XRP, which a reported market cap of over $12.175 billion, is currently the third-most valuable cryptoasset. So far, this year, XRP-USD is up 44.22%.
Featured Image Courtesy of International Money Express, Inc.
