Sending global payments should be easy and cost-effective. Yet, the underlying systems are complex and fragmented, leading to high foreign transfer fees and costly delays.
Together with our customers, Ripple is working to solve the challenges with slow and expensive cross-border payments. Nowhere is this more important than remittance flows to low- and middle-income countries where the need for instant, low-cost payments are a necessity.
In an important step in changing this status quo, Ripple is thrilled to share a new partnership with International Money Express, Inc. (Intermex) (NASDAQ: IMXI)—a leading money remittance services company focused primarily on the Latin America and Caribbean corridor. The partnership will enable Intermex to leverage RippleNet for faster, transparent cross-border remittance services between the United States and Mexico.
More remitters than ever are sending money home to their loved ones through this corridor. According to the World Bank, Mexico is the third highest country with remittance recipients, $36 billion remittance flows in 2019—with the U.S. topping the list of countries with the highest inbound flow to this region.
Intermex is one of the largest U.S. to Mexico remitter service providers in the world—processing more than 30 million payment transactions a year through a network of 100,000 payer locations. Through this partnership, Intermex will be able to settle key currencies and match the timing of funding with its settlement requirements reducing costs and providing transparency to their customers.
Other financial institutions are also working in partnership with Ripple to provide global payment solutions across this important remittance corridor—and seeing tangible results. MoneyGram International is one example. They are using RippleNet’s On-Demand Liquidity service, which relies on the digital asset XRP as real-time bridge between the sending and receiving currencies to enable even faster and cheaper cross-border transactions.
In just six months of implementing the ODL service, MoneyGram Chairman and CEO Alex Holmes announced that the company is moving ten percent of its transaction volume between the U.S. and Mexican borders with plan to expand use of the service into four more corridors this year.
In addition to enabling faster, cheaper payments, ODL eliminates the need for financial institutions to pre-fund accounts in destination currencies—freeing up capital and guaranteeing the most competitive FX rates available.
Since the commercialization of ODL, we have seen significant growth and customer interest with two dozen customers signed on to use the product. Some of the notable customers committed to using ODL include MoneyGram, goLance, Viamericas and FlashFX.
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.