Visa partner Currencycloud is now working with Ripple to expand their business-to-business cross-border payments platform.
Currencycloud says the Ripple partnership will help expand business to places where regulations and limitations restrict opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises, according to a press release from the London-based company.
Says Mike Laven, CEO at Currencycloud,
“Currencycloud is all about bringing clarity, speed and value to the traditionally opaque, costly and time-consuming issues associated with cross-border payments, particularly for SMEs that have historically been under-served by traditional banking. Ripple’s solution will help us to extend our network to new parts of the world, removing more barriers to payments for our clients.”
It remains unclear, however, if Currencycloud plans to utilize On-Demand Liquidity, Ripple’s XRP-powered remittance product.
Earlier this year, Currencycloud raised $80 million in series E funding from a number of prominent companies, including Visa, SBI Group and the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation, Tech Crunch reports. The company, which launched in 2012, is regulated in Europe, the US and Canada, and has processed more than $50 billion in 180 countries.
Last month, Asheesh Birla, Ripple’s senior vice president of product management and corporate development, announced that the San Francisco-based company was shifting its emphasis towards SMEs.
“We are continuing to focus on supporting low-value, high-frequency payments with ODL— though transaction volume may look different in this new world.
In particular, we are reducing emphasis on large treasury payments — which are traditionally used to fund businesses and services in the absence of real-time transfers — to support individual, low-value transactions, addressing the growing need in remittances and SME payments. This may reduce overall ODL transaction volumes.”