Contxto – Here’s a gamble that began in 2014. Back then, the Founders of Bitso believed that the wide unbanked population of Latin America needed blockchain technology and digital assets in order to improve their financial access.
While the bet doesn’t have a final verdict yet, an important achievement has backed up the vision of the Mexican fintech.
Bitso partners with Ripple
Turns out that Bitso recently partnered with businesses and retail customers.
Thanks to this partnership, Bitso gained access to Ripplenet’s On-Demand Liquidity (ODL), which in other words, it is a much more efficient way to convert dollars into the digital assets, namely XRP. After a quick conversión, the XRP can be converted again through Bitso’s banking partners into Mexican pesos.
Bitso’s Head of Finance, Barbara González Briseño, stated that “with help from Ripple, Bitso is now the largest exchange in Latin America.”
“We have the world’s largest liquidity of Mexican pesos to digital assets and we are MoneyGram’s key exchange partner for remittances into Mexico.” Bárbara González Briseño
González Briseño also explained how time-consuming the original process could be. Before crypto-exchanges, sending money abroad meant needing to fill out a form, sign it, scan it, send it to the bank, and then wait a couple of days before the bank purchased the dollars required to make the transfer.
International transfers and remittances in the twenty-first century
While the deficiencies are obvious in the year 2020—basically the era of immediacy—, not knowing the stage of the process was at or the ETA for your transfer was something we already knew should have been fixed years ago.
The Bitso-Ripple team-up now means that a transaction happens instantly. It is also much more cost-effective and you know exactly when the recipient receives it.
“Just a few months after starting work with Ripple, we were able to offer a fully functioning solution to our partners. As of July 2019, we’ve seen a major increase in adoption as well as the volume of transfers we’re facilitating.” Barbara González Briseño.
Bitso estimates that the remittance market between US and Mexico is worth US$35 billion a year, the exchange thus wagers that it has gained a 1.5 percent share of that market in 2019.
Knowing the importance of immediacy these days, remittances are a subject that cannot be left behind in this matter when we talk about people who are living day by day and strongly depend on that money.
Therefore, this partnership has proved a huge step forward in Bitso’s bet to digitize and, at the same time improve, the bancarization deficiencies of the sector. To that end, González Briseño concluded that they now have their eyes on additional bilateral remittance markets, such as Brazil-Argentina, Colombia-Brazil, and US-Peru.
Can you imagine a fully connected Latin America into a single network where everyone can transact instantly and cost-effectively? Neither can I, but I also hope to see it become a reality.
-CM
