Visa is going to buy Earthport, the British payment firm that is one of Ripple’s partners. Now there is a question whether Visa and Ripple will become partners.
By Julia Sakovich
Updated
3 mins read
The end of 2018 has brought us a lot of events and news to talk about. Some of them may bring some real changes to the crypto community in the future. And the following one is potentially one of them.
As it has become recently revealed, the American multinational financial services corporation, Visa Inc reached an acquisition agreement with the UK-based financial services company known as Earthport PLC. Visa will buy this British the cross-border payment that facilitates international transactions for banks and businesses for 198 million pounds which equals $250.6 million.
According to the information revealed, Visa International Service Association made quite a beneficial proposal for Earthport as it offered to pay 30 pence per each Earthport’s share while they were traded just for 7.45 pence per unit on the stock.
Such prominent firms as Rothschild & Co and Goldman Sachs were chosen as advisers on the deal for Earthport and Visa respectively.
The London-based financial services firms considered this offer to be feasible and fair and promised to recommend all its shareholders to think carefully about it. It’s also worth mentioning that Earthport’s shares that are listed on the London Stock Exchange’s secondary market have significantly lost their value this year. The company’s increasing expenses and losses have become a reason why the shares lost more than 28% of their value.
Given these factors, the firm had nothing more to do than to announce last month that now they needed some serious upgrades for their business strategy.
Earthport is known for its lower-cost solutions for making international payments. It offers banks and money transfer firms to establish just a single relationship to conduct payments instead of having numerous ties with multiple payments channels in different corners of the world.
For Visa such payments that presuppose interaction between parties from two or even more countries represents a special sphere of interest. According to the announcement made by Visa in October, this year the volume of cross-border payments has increased by 10%.
A very important detail about the deal that is worth being mentioned is that Earthport is a partner of Ripple. Ripple announced this partnership more than 4 years ago in 2014. Thanks to the integration of Ripple’s cross-border payments protocol to Earthport’s existing payments network, its users have got an opportunity to enjoy lower liquidity management costs as well as high regulatory standards.
Now in the context of the partnership between Visa and Earthport, there are a lot of disputes whether Visa and Ripple will become partners. Some members of Ripple’s community believe that it will happen by default while others insist that it can’t happen due to the fact that Ripple and Visa are rivals.
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Julia is an experienced content writer. She works with various topics and business domains, including but not limited to blockchain, cryptocurrencies, AI, and software development. Her articles are regularly featured on reputable news websites and IT business portals. Currently, Julia is the Editor-in-Chief at Coinspeaker.
