At the moment, the APAC (Asia Pacific) region is experiencing a rise in the remittance sphere. However, according to an article by Pegah Soltani, a senior Product Marketing manager at Ripple, there are some issues with transferring funds between different local currencies.
At the moment, Soltani writes, the APAC market sees around 2 bln remittance transactions per year.
Ripple encourages local remittance services and banks to contact them if they want to improve their systems by using Ripple’s On-Demand Liquidity product that runs on XRP.
Cash still dominates in APAC countries
The article states that in the APAC region, in the Philippines, Thailand and Australia in particular, cash still plays the biggest role when it comes to remittances.
90 percent is named as the local payments value in cash in Thailand.
“Cash transactions still represent a staggering 90% of Thailand’s domestic payments value.”
The same goes for the Philippines. Service providers have to be connected with major outlets dealing with cash payouts, the article says.
The current remittance solutions are hard to scale globally, insists Ripple’s Pegah Soltani.
The necessity to pre-fund bank accounts in destination currencies makes fees very high.
Ripple playing an important part in the Rapidly Growing Asia-Pacific Remittances market. Some great insights at https://t.co/mP21dQczN4
— Marcus Treacher (@marcus_treacher) February 14, 2020
Ripple promotes ODL
The author finally drives the article towards its conclusion – Ripple’s ODL can improve the situation with remittances in the APAC region and make transactions much faster and cheaper.
Soltani offers banks and remittance service providers the opportunity to contact Ripple to see how On-Demand Liquidity can help them serve their customers better.
Ripple’s presence in APAC gets stronger
As recently reported by U.Today, Ripple is increasing its presence in some of the APAC countries. Ripple’s partner, MoneyGram, has recently expanded its presence in Singapore by setting up a website for local users to send funds via ODL.
Also, Ripple has struck a partnership with Intermex, a leader in the remittance industry in Latin America.
Vladislav Sopov