As MoneyGram announced a pilot with Ripple and its xRapid platform, CEO Alex Holmes tells Karen Webster where he sees the opportunity with blockchain tech.
Beyond the excitement and excitability of the trading lie, perhaps, are real-world business use cases, based largely on the distributed ledger technology across which transactions are recorded.
MoneyGram, the money remittance giant, has its sights set on a new strategic front that looks to leverage bits and bytes beyond the hype that clouds cryptocurrencies and the rails over which they travel. To that end, MoneyGram and Ripple are joining forces to pilot a real-time settlement system and protocol that incorporating XRP, Ripple’s digital currency, into MoneyGram’s payment flows. The pilot is being done through xRapid, the companies said in a press release on Jan. 11.
MoneyGram CEO Alex Holmes told Karen Webster that amid optimism in a future in which new ways of moving money cross-border in real-time are beginning to emerge, a cautionary note must ring loud and clear. The excitement, Holmes told Webster, is alive and well – and “absolutely fascinating.”
Use cases are emerging in cryptocurrencies and DLT, but separating the hype from the hope can be a challenge, both acknowledged. “It’s hard to wrap your head around the valuations … and what is driving them, other than the expectation that at some point it will all get figured out and work,” Webster said.
Holmes likened the emergence of bitcoin and others to mining from days of old … really old, as in the Gold Rush. In lieu of pickaxe and shovel, you dig (or, in the age of cryptocurrencies, mine via server farm), find something “and suddenly you are worth a [lot] of money.”
But Holmes made it clear that’s the speculative part of the crypto world – and not where MoneyGram sees the value or value proposition.
Within the ledger technology – the actual underpinnings of cryptocurrencies – is where Holmes said there’s potential. With a nod to Ripple and the nascent partnership with MoneyGram, Holmes focused on two areas as a near-term roadmap for using alternative currencies and DLT to solve MoneyGram’s real business problems.
Source/More: MoneyGram CEO Plans Waves with Ripple | PYMNTS.com
