Ripple Finishes $50M Investment in MoneyGram

| Updated
by Teuta Franjkovic · 3 min read
Ripple Finishes $50M Investment in MoneyGram
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Ripple Labs has just completed a $50 million investment in MoneyGram. Their collaboration dates back to 2018 when MoneyGram decided to test the use of XRP to reduce the costs of its money transfers.

Financial services company MoneyGram International Inc. announced on Monday that a provider of leading enterprise blockchain solutions for global payments Ripple Labs, completed its final $20 million investment in MoneyGram equity consistent to its primarily $50 million equity investment commitment that the company made earlier this year.

The price of share Ripple paid was $4.10 that seems to be pretty much higher than MoneyGram’s current price on the market. As per the announcement, the funding will support MoneyGram’s work that is mainly focusing on volume increase and the On-Demand Liquidity (which was previously known as xRapid) usage. Therefore Moneygram will use Ripple’s On-Demand Liquidity product to enable the situation where the money is sent in one currency and then transferred and settled in the destination currency. By using XRP token for such transfers, On-Demand Liquidity can supposedly make transactions of this kind more efficient than it would be the case with fiat currencies or other major digital assets.

Alex Holmes, MoneyGram Chairman and CEO said:

“Our partnership with Ripple is transformative for both the traditional money transfer and digital asset industry – for the first time ever, we’re settling currencies in seconds. This initial success encourages us to expedite expanding our use of On-Demand Liquidity. Partnerships with companies like Ripple support innovation and allow us to invest in creating better customer experiences. I anticipate furthering our growth into new corridors and exploring new products and services.”

Through its On-Demand Liquidity, MoneyGram is now trading with around 10 percent of its Mexican Peso foreign exchange trading volume and, since the announcement of the partnership with Ripple back in June 2019, has already begun trading in four additional cross-border corridors, including Europe, Australia and the Philippines.

Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse noted:

“Last month, we announced that MoneyGram began using On-Demand Liquidity for payments to the Philippines, and we’re excited to support MoneyGram’s further expansion into Europe and Australia. Digital assets and blockchain technology have the potential to make a tremendous impact on cross-border payments – MoneyGram and Ripple is an example of that. In June, we announced this partnership, and it’s encouraging to see the rapid growth and benefits come to life.”

Ripple invested approximately $30 million in MoneyGram earlier this year and at the same time it arranged a commercial deal with MoneyGram for cross-border settlement using digital assets. After this investment, Ripple will be the owner of 9.95% of the outstanding common stock of MoneyGram, and around 15% on a fully-diluted basis including non-voting warrants held by Ripple.

This is pretty interesting investment for Ripple, especially if it’s known that earlier this month, Garlinghouse gave an interview to Bloomberg in which he claims that, so far, there are too many cryptocurrencies. He also predicted that only 1% of all crypto is here to stay noting that only the small number of crypto projects will be “game-changing” and grow significantly in the decades since they will be focused on solving real problems for real customers.

One thing is sure. This investment came to MoneyGram exactly at the right time since it was forced to cut some operating expenses. Last week the company said it will eliminate as many as 90 jobs by the end of March in order to “streamline operations and structure the company in a way that it will be more agile.”

Even though Moneygram shares closed down 2.28% on Monday, they started rising in premarket trading so, at the time of writing, they were up 0.67% to $3.02.

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