Ripple is turning its attention to the Chinese market as it looks at expanding its services within the Asia Pacific region later this year.
According to a report from Finance Magnates, China’s regulators, payment providers, and banks are looking at Ripple’s xCurrent payment settlement solution as they attempt to improve cross-border settlements with end-to-end tracking.
Sagar Sarbhai, Ripple’s head of government and regulatory relations for Asia Pacific, said:
“This year you will see more announcements coming in on China, in terms of educating and differentiating us from some of the other cryptocurrencies that are out there. As we speak, our team is strategising about entering the market, but it’s still very early days.”
Even though Ripple has yet to reach mainland China, it was reported last month by the company that it had teamed up with LianLian, a Chinese payment provider, to provide faster payments in China. The payment company will receive real-time, cross-border remittances, invoice payments, and e-commerce payments from companies that use Ripple’s payment network, RippleNet.
The partnership between LianLian and Ripple means that it joins Ripple’s network of over 100 financial institutions to deliver faster, cheaper, and frictionless cross-border payment solutions to its customers.
At the time, Emi Yoshikawa, director of joint venture partnerships at Ripple, said:
“Cross-border payments related to China’s e-commerce market reached $1.07 trillion in 2017. There is a huge opportunity to make these payments quicker and more cost-efficient.”
The addition of LianLian provides the stepping stone for Ripple to branch into mainland China. However, efforts so far have been met with delays. The topic of the blockchain and digital currencies in China is something the team are working on at the moment, considering China has issued a ban on cryptocurrency activities.
Sarbhai added:
“We’re trying to get some regulatory clarity, we’ve started engaging informally with banks, FIs and payment providers, speaking to regulators and government bodies, trying to educate on what Ripple is and what our vision is.”
Ripple already has live clients in Japan, India, and Thailand; however, it appears keen to widen its scope to other countries. Through its xRapid solution it aims to provide banks with high liquidity for cross-border transactions. Compared to bitcoin, which can process a limited capacity of 16 transactions per second (TPS), and can take over an hour to fully settle, Ripple is far quicker. So much so, that XRP settles its transactions in seconds and can manage 1,500 TPS, the equivalent to major card networks such as Visa.
