Western Union has become the fifth largest corporation to align with XRP or Ripple to test xRapid. Ripple had earlier signed a deal with Moneygram who has shown its enthusiasm to use this service. xRapid has proved much less popular than Ripple’s enterprise blockchain, which has been trialled by more than 100 financial institutions located across the world.
Western Union CTO Sheri Rhodes said the 167-year-old firm, which was first founded as a telegraph company, is interested in blockchain technology for a many reasons:
We continue to explore possible blockchain applications for our business, and we are piloting some settlement tests with Ripple for certain corridors. For blockchain in general, we’re looking at areas such as transaction processing and settlement, working capital optimisation, regulatory technology, and digital identity. We have a strong platform and system that work well today, but we continue to explore and test whether these technologies could potentially reduce costs and improve the customer experience
The main purpose behind working with Ripple is to increase liquidity and reduce capital needs for financial institutions to operate.
Earlier in January, Dallas-based Moneygram tied up with Ripple to test money transfers. Ripple is known for its instant and low fee money transfers on blockchain technology. Ripple's price touched $1.41 after a dive in late January to 13 February. The crypto currency has a market cap close to $54.9 Billion and is ranked third, below BTC and ETH.