Cofounder and chairman of TransferWise, Taavet Hinrikus recently appeared on the recent episode of Fortune’s “Balancing the Ledger” to talk about blockchain technology. In the speech the Hinrikus especially highlighted Ripple ’s technology and shred professional forecasts on its development in the market.
Taavet Hinrikus started by saying: “we’ve heard this dream many times from different people. However if you start digging into it, you realize that it may look great on paper. But in reality, to make use of it, it’s really hard. We’ve looked at different blockchain technologies, but yet we haven’t found anything which enables us to do what we do in a way that is cheaper or faster”.
The cofounder highlighted the shortage of adoption of the new technology by banks as one of the key challenges currently. And due to nowadays fintech companies finding cheaper ways for money transfer, “bar that blockchain technology must clear to make it worth switching to has gotten higher”.
TransferWise is a startup based in London. The company transfers money between over 70 countries. The key advantage of their system is the quick transaction time that they provide; i.e. payments from Australia to the U.K. take only 15 seconds. The charged fees are also as low as 1% or even lower.
Ripple’s Solutions
While commenting on Ripple’s solutions, the company leader however noted that they do not currently see a better proposition than what TransferWise currently offers to the clients.
“If every bank in the world was going through the Ripple network, it would be amazing. Yet how many banks are using Ripple today in production? It’s a very short list. In that sense we’re big supporters of Ripple or anything else… And if any of these gets enough adoption, and it actually materially helps us do things cheaper and faster, we’d love to. But so far we haven’t found one”, continued Hinrikus.
After explaining how their system is able to cut costs and provide faster solutions, Hinrikus concluded the piece stating: “that’s kind of the only way that we can really make things 10 times better than the existing options we see out there”.
