Ripple is in the news today after it announced a partnership with Mobile Money, a Malaysian mobile wallet company, to facilitate wallet-to-wallet payments between Malaysia and Bangladesh and serve the remittance corridor between the two countries.
Through RippleNet, Mobile Money has connected to bKash, Bangladesh’s largest provider of mobile financial services (MFS), a company that currently serves over 45 million users.
Mutual Trust Bank (MTB) will work as the local banking partner in Bangladesh to perform the remittance settlements under the purview of Bangladesh Bank. According to Kamal Quadir, CEO of bKash,
“This partnership will bring great convenience to both the recipients and senders, and contribute further to our national economy by encouraging inward foreign remittance flow through legal channels.”
Bangladesh has the third-largest remittance flows in South Asia, and the eleventh-largest worldwide, with Malaysia ranked as one of the top five sources of remittances to Bangladesh.
In fact, Mobile Money anticipates that this partnership will increase its user base of Bangladeshi workers by 20% as it enables it to better serve them.
As Lee Eng Sia, Founder of Mobile Money was quick to highlight,
“Our partnership with Ripple makes us one of the first few e-wallet companies to offer such digital remittance solutions to Bangladeshi workers, and we’re confident that it will enable us to stay ahead of the competition while expanding our user base.”
In an interview with Thinking Crypto back in June 2020, SBI Ripple Asia’s Adam Traidman had said that the company had started “limited trial and pilot projects” with various companies for Ripple’s payment corridors, with a greater expansion forecast for 2021.
“The [ODL] technology is much more suited for cross-border payments where the costs are a lot higher,” he said, noting this as one of the reasons why Ripple’s technology is suited for Asia and very successful in South America.
In fact, the company has increased its partnerships with numerous platforms across Asia, including Sentbe and Hanpass, and WireBarley in South Korea, all of which are intended at bringing liquidity costs down significantly.
This partnership with Mobile Money will also serve to further expand Ripple’s On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) to new corridors. Currently, the USD-MXN corridor is Ripple’s largest ODL corridor, seeing over $20,000 in volume in the past 24 hours alone.
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