On Tuesday (June 11), Ripple, the Californian FinTech company that is widely seen as a global leader in blockchain-powered enterprise solutions for cross-border payments, announced that it has launched operations in Brazil, South America’s largest country (and the fifth-largest country in the world).

Ripple is “bringing on seasoned fintech entrepreneur and executive Luiz Antonio Sacco as managing director to drive strategy and build the Ripple ecosystem in the region.”

The announcement was made while Ripple is exhibiting at CIAB Febraban (International Congress & Exhibition of Information Technology for Financial Institutions), which is being held 11–13 Jun 2019 in São Paulo, Brazil. Ripple is here to talk about RippleNet, its global payments network that “makes it easy for financial institutions and payment providers to send cross-border payments worldwide.” 

As cross-border payments solutions provider Ripple explained in a blog post on 21 September 2018, membership of the RippleNet network offers the following benefits:

  • Access: “By joining RippleNet’s single worldwide network of institutions, organizations gain a single point of access to a standardized, decentralized infrastructure for consistency across all global connections.”
  • Certainty: “RippleNet’s atomic pass-fail processing ensures greater certainty in delivery, and its bi-directional messaging capability provides unprecedented end-to-end transaction visibility for fees, delivery time and status.”
  • Speed: “With RippleNet, banks and providers can reduce transaction times from days to mere seconds.”
  • Savings: “Existing payment networks have high processing and liquidity provisioning costs that result in fees as high as $25 or $35 per transaction. RippleNet’s standardized rules and network-wide connectivity significantly lower processing costs.”

As CryptoGlobe reported, on January 8, Ripple announced that it had acquired another 13 customers for RippleNet, its global payment network, bringing the total to over 200. 

According to the press release shared with CrypoGlobe, Eric van Miltenburg, SVP of Global Operations, stated:

“The company is experiencing rapid customer growth across all markets, and is launching in Brazil in response to high customer demand in South America. We are fortunate to have Luiz on board to expand our presence in the region and help our customers address the challenges of cross-border payments.”

Ripple says that it “already has more than a dozen Brazilian financial institutions and money transfer companies on RippleNet,” including Santander Brazil (“one of the largest commercial banks in Brazil with over nine million customers”), BeeTech Global (which “provides international payment services to more than 150,000 customers worldwide and is one of the many emerging money service providers relying on new technologies like Ripple to power faster, more reliable and affordable international payments”), and Banco Rendimento (“a pioneer in the international payments space in Brazil”).

Luiz Antonio Sacco, Ripple’s Managing Director for Brasil & South America, had this to say:

“We’re excited to grow our ecosystem in the region and bring additional financial institutions onto RippleNet to help provide excellent, efficient cross-border payment experiences for their customers. Brazil is a leader in fintech innovation and positioned to forge a path for the rest of Latin America to follow.”

 Ripple says this year it is “focused on growing its customer base and team in Brazil, and across South America including in countries such as Chile, Peru and Argentina.”

Furthermore, the company is committed to using its University Blockchain Research Initiative (UBRI), which was launched in June 2018, to helping “top tier Brazilian universities, including University of São Paulo and Fundação Getulio Vargas.”

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