Ripple Bolsters European Foothold, Partnerships Announced

Payment company Ripple announced a partnership with a payment provider for the online marketplace Lemonway. This is the first France-based customer that will leverage RippleNet’s On Demand Liquidity (ODL) solution, supported by XRP.

The payment provider will use ODL to improve its treasury payment process. As Bitcoinist reported, Ripple has been trying to expand the use cases for ODL and XRP by allowing partners to optimize their treasury funds flow and management.

Thus, Lemonway will be able to remove friction from its treasury process, eliminate the need for pre-fund accounts abroad, and reduce costs from the entire process. Jeremy Ricordeau, Chief Operating Officer for Lemonway, said:

By using Ripple’s ODL to underpin Lemonway’s treasury operations we are looking forward to bringing significant benefits to our business which we can in turn pass onto our clients. Ripple’s solution allows us greater flexibility around when we make payments to our partners, releasing us from the traditional banking cut-off cycle and driving operational efficiencies (…).

Ripple Gets A Foothold In European Payments, Demand For OLD Will Get Stronger?

In addition to their cooperation with Lemonway, the payment company also announced a partnership with Swedish money transfer provider Xbaht. The partners will enable the first XRP-based bridge between Sweden and Thailand.

Thus, customers in this country will be able to send and receive instant and low-cost retail remittances. Michael Andersen, Chief Executive Officer at Xbaht, said the following on their shared vision with the payment company about cross-border payments and how this partnership will allow them to materialize it:

Like Ripple, we believe that international payments should be quick and seamless. This is why we’re excited to establish our new partnership to streamline the process for our customers sending remittances between the two countries, making the process faster and more reliable, and lowering the cost (…).

A research titled “Crypto trend in business and beyond”, conducted by the payment company, claims that the demand for XRP-based products is high. The report conducted a survey of financial institutions in Europe to measure their interest in crypto and blockchain technology.

The research concluded that 70% of the participants have a positive view of the underlying tech that supports digital assets. They believe blockchain will have a “massive or significant impact on their business in the next five years”.

In addition, around 60% of the respondents claim to be interested in using crypto and blockchain for payments. Thus, these two new Ripple partnerships are critical in a region looking to extend its integration with the nascent asset class.

The payment company has been entangled in a legal battle against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over the alleged offering of an unregistered security, XRP. However, the perception in the crypto space is that Ripple will see a positive result.

If the demand for OLD and XRP payments products was already high, it could trend much higher if the payment company scores a win with the SEC. Additional data provided by Ripple claims that their XRP-based product grew around 10 times since 2021 with an annualized payment volume standing at $15 billion.

At the time of writing, XRP trades at $0.48 and consolidates around key resistance with a 2% profit in the last 7 days. XRP’s price positive price performance, when most cryptocurrencies trade in the red, speaks volumes of the market pricing in a favorable result for the payment company.