Ripple’s focus on the cross border transaction market has been evident from all its updates and developments. But apart from this, the company has revealed that they want to create a more seamless payment network easily accessible to society.
In a recent Ripple blog post, Marcus Treacher, the Ripple SVP Customer Success spoke about what lies in store for financial markets in 2020.
The Ripple official had five major pointers as to what might change in the coming months. Treacher spoke about how the international payments market will continue to get faster and smaller by leveraging emerging technologies. He claimed that there will be more developments oriented towards consumer solutions and increased SME needs.
Marcus Treacher opined that major mainstream banks will delve fully into making cross border transactions faster than ever. This is expected to be done by reducing overhead costs, a major hindrance in the current scenario. To carry out this plan, banks are expected to use upcoming technologies like the Interledger Protocol [ILP].
Today Ripple works closely with a lot of institutional investors and the insights the company received are invaluable. Treacher predicted that in the coming months, banks will turn to cloud providers of banking technology to help reduce overhead costs. According to the Ripple blog:
“…cloud-hosted banking technology providers have developed new platforms with modern methods, pioneers of cloud service providers are ideally positioned to easily and inexpensively integrate into emerging blockchain networks, Artificial Intelligence (AI) engines and other emerging fintech categories—meaning the competitive advantage of innovative banks over slower-moving rivals will be intensified.”
Building consumer solutions on an international level was also a major area of interest for Ripple and other companies. One concept being tested out is in the field of instant cross border settlement. This would mean that an international tourist can conduct payments in a foreign country while trading in their native currency.
This would be done by tying up banks in multiple countries under the umbrella of a decentralized blockchain network. Micropayments have been tested out in small scale applications like Telegram and Line but the vision for the future is to scale it on a global level.
Small-to-Medium Enterprises [SMEs] are expected to be the biggest beneficiaries of the burgeoning decentralized economy. Marcus Treacher stated that if SMEs use blockchain technology, it will free up more capital for reinvestment. This is then expected to open up SMEs to new markets.
The Asian and the South Asian markets have taken multiple steps over the past few months to become major players in the decentralized economy. This determination to outdo the western markets has been a reason why more and more Asian companies were adopting blockchain technology. Treacher revealed that this rapid expansion will increase the digital asset trade rate coming in from Asia, which at present stands at a whopping eighty percent.