Ripple’s Global Head of Infrastructure Innovation, Dilip Rao gave a speech at Global Islamic Economic Summit 2018 where he revealed that company is planning to open an office in Dubai. According to Rao, Ripple is seriously planning to enter the Middle East market. Moreover, company’s new office will be opened by the end of this year.
Rao highlighted the importance of the new market for the company. He also explained the prospective of Ripple’s products within the regulatory environment of the Middle East. “Our focus initially is on cross-border payments because we think that’s where there is the most friction. In this part of the world, there is a huge requirement for cross-border transactions. This will support the economy both within the region and the rest of the world”, further stated the executive.
In addition, he informed that Ripple has already signed about 200 institutions from different countries with many of them being from the Middle East. The list of clients of the company reportedly includes the largest Islamic bank in Saudi Arabia, Al-Rajhi, as well as Kuwait Finance House.
Rao went on stating: “if you wanted to send money out of UAE, it could have been a costly and a slow exercise in some parts of the world. South Asia, for example, has given up on using SWIFT and has built its own proprietary technologies. This allows it to interface into these corridors. They move money quickly and cheaply to meet the needs of the customers in these high-volume corridors”.
How Ripple Solutions will Benefit the Market
Rao also explained how the solutions by Ripple are able to solve the problems of high transactions fees. “If you now think about machines talking to each other and making maybe 50 billion transactions every year, we are now talking about micropayments a tenth of a cent. The existing infrastructure is unable to cope with this very low value, high volume transactions. We think that is a requirement to build a new set of infrastructure. This will be able to support this kind of a digital economy”, concluded the executive.
