When we talk cross-border payments, the two names come to mind: Ripple and Swift. The two platforms can be very complementary and help speed up cross-border transactions, as Marjan Delatinne, Ripple’s head of global banking suggested in an interview.
Expanding on that, in a recent release on Technative, Marcus Treacher, the SVP of Customer Sucess at Ripple, said that the trend of enabling customers to send and receive low-value payments in real-time would accelerate in 2020, as customer demand for frictionless on-demand payments continues to rise.
Keeping Ripple’s payment system as a reference point, Treacher explained how the global economy would experience further growth of micro and wallet payments in the coming year which would, in turn, enable instant and low-value payment flows.
Treacher also hinted that a payment system shift would occur in the future. Elaborating on the topic, he stated,
“The shift from traditional, large-value batch flows to low-value, high-volume payments will help SMEs break into new markets much faster. SMEs are often young and fast-growing which exposes them to cash flow crises through late payments from their larger, foreign buyer”.
He added that the traditional and large-value batch flows would decline, while low-value and high-volume payments would be on the rise. This, he said, would help the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) break into new markets much faster.
Declaring that the cross-border payment services these days were slow, uncertain, prone to errors and accrue extremely high costs, he asserted that new blockchain payment technologies like Ripple’s enable SMEs to invoice and receive international payments immediately, in small amounts, and with certainty.
He also made a note of how Ripple’s recent mobile app would come in handy for tourists. Explaining further, he stated,
“Imagine if a Japanese tourist visiting Thailand could buy goods using a mobile app or QR code, triggering an immediate cross-border payment from their Japanese yen account to a Thai baht merchant’s account. If more consumer purchase solutions start leveraging blockchain technology in the same way, the payoff will – quite literally – be huge.”
In conclusion, predicting that there is enormous scope for blockchain technology, he said getting Ripple to address issues of liquidity, speed of implementation, and the cost of capital would make micro-transactions such as loans, payments, remittances be more efficient and transparent.
