I’ve been sitting on this post for a couple of days, but finally decided to post it tonight. As always, just connecting dots together by using public information – this isn’t my way of saying anything will happen, just information that I found incredibly interesting that I’d like to share and hear your thoughts on.
After my post connecting many dots to Ripple, I decided to look backwards and take a deeper dive into what I think could make sense for a possible partnership using xRapid. A few weeks ago I reread the article that said dLocal was using Ripple and another article saying they were partnered with AliPay, among others. Ant Financial is part of Alibaba and operates AliPay. Alibaba is massive. Ant Financial is massive (most valuable fintech in the world). AliPay is massive. I don’t think we can even comprehend how many people are intertwined with Alibaba, so I decided to start with AliPay to see what I could find. Here’s an example of what I found:
The Ripple website gives a simple breakdown of how xRapid works. Payment providers use xRapid to send XRP to banks, who then pay the beneficiaries in their currency.
Here is a nice illustration: https://ripple.com/solutions/source-liquidity/
We know how big AliPay is in China, but in 2017 AliPay AGGRESSIVELY partnered with payment providers all over the world, integrating AliPay into their existing software. For example, dLocal in South America. This partnership allows Chinese buyers to make purchases from South American merchants using AliPay. AliPay deducts the amount of a payment from the buyer’s account in real-time in CNY and settles the payment to the merchant in a foreign currency. Below are some of the payment providers that AliPay has partnered with that pertain to this article – there are MANY more:
Time for my favorite part: connecting dots between AliPay, payment providers in certain countries or regions, and banks using Ripple in those countries. These are just some examples, there are many more.
The next part I stumbled upon is right in front of our eyes. On Ripple’s website you can go to the XRP page, and if you scroll down to the Distributed section it has a map with white dots that are blinking. Notice the countries where these dots are: the US, Brazil, South Africa, the UK, France, Germany, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam, China, and Japan.
And these banks I mentioned above are just some examples of the banks that are in these countries. Let’s look at the number of branches of these banks:
Santander: ~650 retail banks
Standard Chartered: More than 1,200 branches
Reisebank: More than 100 locations in Germany and also partnered with Western Union
NAB: 1,590 branches as of 2014
WestPac: 1,429 branches as of 2015
Shanghai Huarui: A couple of locations, but this is big because banks need approval from the China Banking Regulatory Commission before engaging in cross-border business
Tokyo-Mitsubishi: 868 branches as of 2009
This is what makes this so massive.
Is the map a stretch? Maybe. But maybe not. Would not put it past Ripple to slip something like this in front of us. This is just some preliminary research, but from what I can tell, AliPay is partnered with payment providers all around the world, meaning merchants all around the world can accept this payment method. xRapid fits perfectly for AliPay – XRP is sent to the payout banks all over the world whenever a customer uses AliPay, and the payout banks then send the desired currency to the beneficiaries.
AliPay is the largest mobile payment platform in the world with over 520,000,000 users, and they are quickly partnering with every payment provider they can in order for their customers to be able to make payments all over the world.