On Thursday (April 4), UK-based money transfer provider RationalFX Ltd (“RationalFX”) announced that it had partnered with Ripple to make “money transfers faster, easier and more secure.”

RationalFX was founded by Rajesh Agrawal and Paresh Davdra in 2005; the company was started  with “just a laptop and $3,000.” The aim of the two founders was to provide ” a much better and cheaper way for people and businesses to transfer money overseas” than going via a bank.

Since then, “without any borrowing or external investment,” London-based RationalFX has become “one of Europe’s key international payment providers” with over 100,000 clients, and it has processed around $10 billion in payments. 

Here is how RationalFX made the announcement on Twitter:

Fans of Ripple first heard about RationalFX almost a year ago (on 26 April 2018) when Ripple mentioned it as new customer in a post titled “xVia Opens New Doors in Emerging Markets” on its Insights blog.

In this blog post, Ripple started by explaining what xVia is:

“xVia allows for financial institutions and businesses to easily send payments to and from emerging markets by leveraging the benefits of RippleNet — Ripple’s decentralized global payments network.

By providing a standard API solution, xVia lets companies that want to send payments — payment providers, digital wallets and other corporates — quickly scale their businesses, differentiate their services and address their customers’ unique needs. The individuals and businesses that rely on them can send payments faster and cheaper anywhere in the world.

Similarly, for corporate marketplaces and financial institutions that are looking to scale, xVia provides the only quick and simple way to send payouts to new corridors while also creating a faster and more reliable user experience.

In this manner, xVia serves as a vehicle for a variety of different players within the global payments ecosystem to interact and complete transactions directly — no longer requiring custom connections. It can also help smaller businesses that want to leverage the same technology and standardized ruleset to send real-time, traceable payments around the world.”

It then said that “FairFX, Exchange4Free, RationalFX, UniPAY and MoneyMatch” would be leveraging “xVia’s standard API solution to power payments through RippleNet and access new markets, including emerging markets faster and more efficiently.”

Although RationalFX’s original tweet did not mention which parts of Ripple’s technology it was using, later, when some members of the XRP community on Twitter asked if it was using xRapid, RationalFX’s official Twitter out sent out this reply:

Although some fans of XRP may be disappointed to hear that RationalFX is not currently using xRapid, RationalFX did start from the entry-level product xVia and then later move on to xCurrent. So, it probably would not be too surprising if at some point in the future it realized that it might be able to make additional savings by trying xRapid.

Marcus Treacher, Global Head of Strategic Accounts at Ripple, had this response to RationalFX’s announcement:

 

Featured Image Courtesy of RationalFX Ltd