Visa buys Ripple Partner Earthport for 250 million US dollars

The adaptation of the blockchain can be felt in many areas of the economy worldwide. The advantages and potentials of this new technology do not go unnoticed even by large companies like Visa. Not surprisingly the step of Visa seems to be to buy the already long-standing partner of Ripple Earthport.

According to the latest Reuters report, Visa has paid a total of more than USD 250,000 for the British payment service provider Earthport to take over the company. The London-based company handles transactions worldwide for banks and larger companies. Earthport has been working closely with Ripple since December 2014 to make cross-border transfers faster, cheaper and more secure. After a long development phase, the Earthport Distributed Leger Hub was launched in 2016. In the same year, the first cross-border payment was made by using the block chain (freely translated):

[…] the first cross-border payment transaction received by Santander UK via Distributed Ledger. This made it the first British bank to implement Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) for cross-border payments worldwide.

Earthport explains that Ripple is instrumental in supporting the company’s mission and mission to “enable access to as many countries, currencies, accounts and payment methods as possible through a single API”. Visa International Service Association wants to further expand the business of cross-border payments through this acquisition. This segment accounts for approximately 10% of total global revenue. This includes transactions involving at least 2 countries worldwide.

Earthport’s customers include Bank of America and Japan Post Bank. Visa’s offer is a revised proposal by Visa, which was presented to companies a month ago. Earthport offers companies a cost-effective alternative to traditional payment systems and one-stop services. As banks and money transfer companies typically operate across multiple payment channels around the world to quickly transfer funds from one country to another, Earthport’s new service is a cost-effective alternative.