Ripple’s technology will form the basis of a new XRP-based remittance service from International Money Express (Intermex).
Ripple announced Tuesday it is partnering with Intermex, which will leverage RippleNet – a network of institutional payment providers using Ripple’s several payments solutions – to develop “faster, transparent cross-border remittance services” between the U.S. and Mexico.
The new partnership is expected to reduce settlement time and cut some of the costs. It will also give Intermex access to Ripple’s On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) service, which uses XRP as a real-time bridge between sending and receiving currencies, speeding up settlement times and lowering costs to “fractions of a penny.”
It’s unclear when Intermex will put the RippleNet integration into production mode. CEO Bob Lisey said the firm is looking forward to “implementing new solutions on RippleNet and ODL to help drive growth and deliver greater efficiency.”
The U.S.-Mexico remittance corridor is the largest in the region, and one of the largest in the world. Mexico received more than $36 billion in remittances in 2019, mainly coming from the U.S. Intermex processes more than 30 million transactions a year from over 100,000 locations in this corridor, according to the announcement.
MoneyGram, which piloted XRP at the beginning of 2018, announced in November it would expand its ODL service into more of its remittance corridors. The firm’s CEO, Alex Holmes, announced at Ripple’s 2019 Swell Conference that more than 10 percent of remittances from its U.S.-Mexican corridor had been processed using ODL.
The same month, Ripple completed its acquisition of a $50 million equity stake in MoneyGram.