Crypto payments specialist Ripple has been revealing updated products and partnerships at its annual flagship event Ripple Swell, being held in Dubai. The enhanced Ripple Payments platform aims to provide a simplified cross-border payment platform to target corporations with no prior blockchain experience, and a partnership with Onafriq will focus on remittance payments between Africa and other markets.
Simplified Ripple Payments
Ripple Payments is now all about simplicity. Having spent years wooing financial institutions and existing money transmitters, the company has expanded its focus to include companies that aren’t already in the payments business. This means ease of use has become a key priority, as head of payments products, Brendan Berry explains:
“We abstract all the complexity of interacting with digital assets and any knowledge or knowhow associated with blockchain and provide customers with an elegant solution so they can immediately start sending payments.”
Ripple hopes that the new platform will attract a new type of corporate client in the U.S., leveraging its experience and newly gained money transmitter licenses in the country to provide a simple and efficient enterprise solution.
Following onboarding, new corporate clients will be able to send instant payments to other users, meaning cross-border payments can be made to suppliers, vendors or overseas staff. The improved Ripple Payments solution will also integrate the XRP Ledger’s native decentralized exchange (DEX), improving global liquidity options.
Connecting Africa to Gulf nations, U.K. and Australia
The second initiative announced was a partnership with African FinTech Onafriq. Onafriq is a major payments company on the continent with over 500 million mobile wallet customers across 40 African countries. The collaboration is focused on payment corridors between Africa and Australia, the U.K. and the Gulf Cooperation Council.
Using the Ripple Payments platform, customers of Zazi Transfer (Australia), PayAngel (UK) and Pyypl (GCC) will be able to send remittances to Onafriq customers in 27 countries across its pan-African network.
Ripple sticks it to the man
Ripple has become somewhat of a poster child for the crypto community thanks to its refusal to back down against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the long-running legal saga. In July the firm scored a partial victory, as a judge ruled that the XRP token was not a security in terms of programmatic sales on exchanges.
Last month the regulator lost its motion to appeal the July ruling, and two weeks later dismissed its previous charges against Ripple’s founders.
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