Western Union’s CEO Hikmet Ersek offered the latest update regarding a potential partnership with Ripple during the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Western Union is still testing Ripple

It seems that Western Union did not reach a conclusion regarding Ripple so far.

He said that the company hasn’t finished testing Ripple’s products and they haven’t figured out whether Ripple’s solutions can indeed enhance the company’s settlement system.

“The main reason for [the partnership] was optimizing our settlement system, to really manage the volatility. We tested with Mexico, one of our biggest corridors – the US to Mexico, dollars to pesos. And you have to understand that we have a system of 137 currencies settling in seconds,” he said.

On the other hand, he made sure to highlight the fact that this does not mean that things went wrong.

“We did invest in several cryptocurrency companies and several blockchain companies. We are learning on that, but the system we currently have settling in 137 currencies in seconds has been very efficient, and we did not find an alternative yet.”

Ripple’s solutions for cross-border payments, chosen by more banks

Ripple has some powerful solutions to offer for cross-border payments, and this is what will make more banks and financial institutions ditch the traditional payments system and move towards more innovative solutions.

Euro Exim Bank has already made this move and ditched SWIFT in favor of Ripple’s XRP-powered xRapid.

Euro Exim Bank started using Ripple’s XRP-powered product xRapid in Q1 2019 and this was because they lost a transaction while using SWIFT.

BeeTech Global Brazil-based payment service uses RippleNet to make remittance payments from people all over the globe.

The fees that are used by the company are much lower compared to the ones of Western Union, and the speed of transactions is much faster compared to the ones of SWIFT, the traditional payments system.