Ripple and XRP have what it takes to revolutionize the lucrative $27 trillion cross-border payment market. With the potential to reduce international transfers from the traditional 3-5 business days to just a few seconds, experts believe Ripple Payments is a sleeping giant whose time has come.
Renowned writer and entrepreneur Max Avery recently noted on an X Post that the traditional cross-border payment market was sluggish and expensive. However, he opined that the Ripple Payments system that facilitated settling in XRP was bound to “change how money moves worldwide.” According to Avery, Ripple and XRP were strategically placed to address the substantial obstacles bedevilling the cross-border payment industry.
The Ripple and XRP Solution
Despite the current developments in the world of technology, especially in the fintech industry, the international payment sector has remained slow and expensive. Currently dominated by services like SWIFT, users are forced to endure between three and five days of waiting with a system that has numerous intermediaries, including Fintech institutions and banks.
In addition to the inadvertent delays, this usually leads to high costs in an opaque system that users can’t really track in real-time. The effects are especially serious for users in less developed countries where remittances play a huge role, leading to costs that amount to nearly 1% of those countries’ GDP.
According to Avery, Ripple, and XRP, they have developed a seamless process using a standardized global network of financial institutions where real-time messaging creates the required efficiency. The Ripple Payments system runs an On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) feature that uses the XRP token as a bridge currency.
With ODL, users don’t have to create pre-funded accounts since the system offers an automated currency conversion and real-time settlement system across the XRP blockchain, which takes between 3 and 5 seconds to complete a transaction. Moreover, Ripple Payments operates 24/7, thereby enhancing the efficiency of the cross-border payment market. It also mitigates capital constraints that banks have to endure within the existing systems by eliminating the place of nostro-vostro accounts.
Transforming a Cross-Border Payment Industry
According to the expert, Ripple and XRP have adopted a strategy that has focused primarily on partnerships associated with high-volume corridors with global multinational institutions. Nonetheless, the system currently faces regulatory challenges due to an uncertain legal status, especially in the United States. Avery opined that Ripple Payment’s active engagement, which is buoyed by a compliance-first approach, showed the company’s commitment to creating a legally compliant and committed approach to its expansion strategy. The pundit remains optimistic that the ongoing legal challenges affecting Ripple Labs will progress positively under a future administration that is friendly to the cryptocurrency space.
Experts have observed significant growth in the cross-border payment industry, both in the business-to-business and consumer-to-consumer sectors, over the last few years, with business taking the lion’s share. According to Avery, Ripple, and XRP have blockchain-based products that are best placed to transform the industry, with Ripple Payments being at the forefront of this emerging trend. Formerly known as RippleNet, XRP’s cross-border payment solution is already connected with numerous global financial institutions, which is placing its real-time payments infrastructure at a vantage point in transforming the industry.
Conclusion
The views by Avery come at a time when there is increased institutional interest in the cryptocurrency space. The exchange-traded fund (ETF) sub-sector is especially popular, with Ripple and XRP trying to create an XRP ETF via Bitwise and Canary Capital through their respective applications for licensing. This comes hot on the heels of successful Bitcoin and Ether ETFs that have seen great financial inflows in recent days.
Because of these successes, Avery believes that the cross-border payment market could benefit greatly by fully adopting the Ripple Payment offering especially when it overcomes the existing regulatory restrictions. By going ahead and adopting hybrid solutions and a phased implementation approach, Ripple could easily integrate its payments system with existing fiat systems to address the current challenges.
