TL:DR
Mercury FX, a UK company that brands itself as a “hassle-free and cost-effective alternative to banks for receiving and sending international currencies” recently teamed up with Ripple and announced that they had processed their largest payments across Ripple Net using XRP (£3,521.67 or $4,552.41, from UK to Mexico). They cited that UK based Mustard Foods was able to save £79.17 and 31 hours on the transaction. Mustard Foods is a food production company that supplies over 500 restaurants in the UK and Europe. They’ve benefitted from Ripple Net by being able to make faster and cheaper payments to suppliers in order to get their ingredients more quickly.
This is the latest example of mainstream adoption and utility being displayed by XRP. Ripple Net has already been in the news this year for signing over 200 customers. The network is offering real value not only for merchants like Mercury Foods but for banks and payment processing services like Mercury FX.
1/1 We’ve made our largest payments across RippleNet using #XRP – 86,633.00 pesos (£3,521.67) from the U.K. to Mexico in seconds. pic.twitter.com/WsHJuZTiOy
— Mercury-fx Ltd (@mercury_fx_ltd) January 17, 2019
Although the quantities being sent seem small compared to the billions of dollars that are moved between crypto wallets each day, we are only witnessing businesses dip their toes into the world of crypto. Once they start to feel comfortable with the results, then we should expect to see much larger payments being processed.
One of the unique qualities about Ripple (and the reason why it is both successful and highly criticized) is because it seems to be finding a way to disrupt the traditional banking system without actually displacing the banks. In fact, for Ripple, their ultimate goal is to help banks and centralized payment services continue to do what they do, but only faster and cheaper.
This stands counterintuitive to what the Bitcoin blockchain is aiming to achieve; which is both disruption and displacement of the current banking system, similar to how digital downloads and online streaming disrupted the record business.
This strategy may work in certain markets where payment services are so poor that they are better off being displaced (for example; foreign exchange and international remittance services for countries where the currency is weak). However, in developed markets like Europe and the US, using some aspects of blockchain technology (i.e. private, permissioned ledgers) to improve traditional financial institutions makes more sense for immediate adoption and profitability.