Earlier this month, Fortune revealed that Ripple Labs — — an American fintech company — just completed its Series C round, raising $200 million — sourced from global investment firm Tetragon, Japanese finance-centric conglomerate SBI, and Route 66 Ventures — and securing a valuation of $10 billion, higher than WeWork.
Despite this positive news, Ripple isn’t resting on its laurels.
Ripple Looks To Further Expand Into Brazil
According to a recent report from the Brazilian arm of media giant Reuters, Luiz Antonio Sacco, managing director of South America at Ripple, remarked that the company will soon begin a further foray into the South American market, taking a focus on Brazil.
The article revealing this news was first published in Portuguese, but the translated piece states that one of Ripple’s goals in 2020 is to establish relationships with financial institutions and regulators in Brazil to help the local remittance scene, specifically in terms of making the industry more efficient. Central bank data suggests that the remittance industry processed at least $4.6 billion worth of payments during the first 11 months of 2019.
The executive said:
With successive advances in Brazilian banking regulation to facilitate financial transactions, including international, opportunities here will grow greatly in the coming years.
As it stands, most of the transactions are completed via SWIFT, the Reuters report said, which is an “expensive process that can take up to a week.”
Hence Ripple’s solutions, like On-Demand Liquidity. The company executive told Reuters that Ripple’s services can decrease the cost of remittance within Brazil, or at least the fees charged by banks, by 90%, due to the relatively low-cost and more efficient characteristics of blockchain technologies compared to the traditional financial stack.
While this sounds ambitious, observers believe that Ripple can make not only a positive impact on Brazilian finance but global finance too.
Top Analyst Lauds Ripple
Per previous reports from Ethereum World News, Jeffrey Tucker of the American Institute of Economic Research, the value of XRP and the aforementioned company is to improve on the shortcoming of the “antique SWIFT system.”
Tucker said in an interview with Russia Today that XRP is an “extremely important technology,” before adding that the “legacy financial systems are incapable of dealing with the new age of globalization so taking crypto to kind of fill this market niche.”
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