Ripples Hires Ex Facebook Exec to Improve Cross-Border Transactions

Ripple is known for its different marketing strategies. It has been known for using celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher just to get the cryptocurrency’s name on the map. This time around, Ripple is getting Kahina Van Dyke who worked as Facebook’s global director of financial services and payments partnerships. Van Dyke also played a role in Mastercard and Citibank.

According to the blog post that announced Van Dyke’s addition to Ripple, “Companies like Facebook have improved access to services, digitized payment flows and made it quicker and easier for people to transact with each other domestically”. Van Dyke was specifically chosen by Ripple in order to “eliminate the friction in cross-border payments”.

According to Van Dyke, an outdated system used for cross-border transactions makes payment complex. She also mentioned that the global payment system that is currently being “no longer meets the real-time needs of business today”.

More Efficient Solution to Cross-Border Transactions?

Van Dyke has more than 2 decades of experience working for prominent companies such from Facebook to Mastercard. And working as the Global Director of Financial Services and Payment Partnerships at Facebook for two years only means that she has what it takes to help improve cross-border transaction. She even stressed the necessity to provide businesses and individuals with a solution for transferring “small and large amounts of money faster and at lower cost”.

According to Van Dyke, “We’ve been having problems with cross-border payments for 30 years”. There are many fees not to mention slow transaction time involved when it comes to cross-border payments.

So why exactly are banks not applying blockchain? One of the things that is seen as a problem why banks are unlikely to make use of blockchain is mainly due to low scalability and privacy problems according to Ripple chief cryptographer David Schwartz.

However, a study by Imperial College and eToro mentioned that cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have the potential to become a mainstream means of payment because of its capability to improve overall cross-border payment system.

Is Ripple Really Solving Cross-Border Payment Problems?

But could Ripple really solve issues in cross-border payment? Keep in mind that Western Union declared that experimenting with XRP did not produce significant savings in the cost of cross-border payment. However, Ripple thinks that the scope was too small in order to draw a conclusion.

David Schwartz was promoted to CTO and is replacing Stefan Thomas who was responsible for creating many elements in the blockchain tech. According to Schwartz, “Building a global network of financial institutions who are using blockchain-based solutions is no small task, but we have the technical folks at Ripple to make it a reality. We’re also going to hire a lot more of them”.

Schwartz is also going to be in charge of further decentralizing the XRP Ledger. This is quite important since SEC suggests that digital assets that can be influenced by a central actor can be considered as a security. The US Securities and Exchange Commission may have considered Bitcoin and Ethereum as commodities but still not for XRP. In fact, there are lawsuits that claim XRP as a security.