Ripple opened a new market for its On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) services by signing a partnership with the leading European fintech firm FINCI this week. The new deal is said to enable faster and easier cross-border payments between small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) on different continents.
According to an official announcement, payments, powered by RippleNet financial technology, will help retail and business customers in Europe and Mexico to send and receive cross-border payments in real-time.
#ODL is coming to Lithuania! We’re excited to partner with FINCI to open up a new payments corridor between Europe & Mexico, making it easier than ever for consumers & businesses in these regions to send/receive payments in real-time.Learn more: https://t.co/jIXQa4iqje— Ripple (@Ripple) May 18, 2022
Cross-border payments have traditionally been slow, complex and unreliable, said Sendi Young, the Ripple’s Managing Director for Europe. According to her, RippleNet’s On-Deman Liquidity (ODL) service will give European and Mexican customers a new way to grow and scale their business by tapping into global crypto liquidity.
RippeNet’s ODL service allows using the XRP coin as a bridge currency of a payment flow. This means, that when a sender initiates a transaction in a local currency, the RippleNet converts the amount into the equivalent of the XRP on a crypto exchange. It instantly sends the funds into a partner exchange in a receiver’s country, where XRRs are converted back into the local fiat currency.
A Lithuania-based FINCI payment service provider offers financial services for private and business customers across 29 countries, including the key markets in European Union and Mexico.
The partnership is said to expand Ripple’s ODL service geography, which currently covers 25 markets including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. According to Ripple, the interest in blockchain-based payment services is increasingly growing in Europe, where nearly 60% of respondents at financial institutions in Europe are keen to use blockchain for payment transfers.
Ripple, which is one of the first enterprise-grade blockchain and crypto payment service providers, accounted for $15 billion worth of RippleNet’s annualized payment volume in 2021.