Ripple is the third best coin in the market, that you can buy today. And for good reason. But the thing to keep in mind while talking and considering Ripple as an investment is to remember that it is a payment protocol and not just another cryptocurrency.

Ripple was designed and made to facilitate banks to make cross-border payments to each other. The biggest advantages of using the Ripple payment protocol is that it brings down transaction fees and time significantly.

Here are a couple of massive partnerships that Ripple has managed to secure in the first quarter of 2018.

Moneygram

MoneyGram is the world famous money transfer company. MoneyGram is based out of Dallas. Customers can use MoneyGram to send and receive money, pay bills, etc. It is the second largest payment transfer company in the world.

On the 11th of January, the company announced that it would be partnering with Ripple and would start using XRP. In the partnership, MoneyGram will be using XRP ledger and the xRapid system, making cross-border payments cheaper and faster.

MoneyGram plans to solve its liquidity issues, make transfers cheaper and reduce transfer time by more than half. All of which are suffered by every financial structure.

Mercury FX

Mercury FX is an international currency specialist that provide low price transfers and exchanges. The company also facilitates cross-border payments. And like every financial company and service provider, they faced liquidity issues and charged high transaction fees.

They too plan to bring the transaction fee and time by partnering with Ripple and using its token XRP and platform.

ICYMI – since launching xRapid beta late last summer, we’ve signed on 4 customers: @MoneyGram @Cuallix @IDT_Corp and @mercury_fx_ltd – payment providers are leading the way to use $XRP in real money pilots. https://t.co/TzSVZJbHMy — Ripple (@Ripple) January 25, 2018

IDT Corporation

The IDT Corporation partnership was announced along with that of leading currency expert, Mercury FX. The IDT Corporation is an American telephonic company that specializes in pre-paid and VoIP telephony.

Their reasons were the same as Mercury FX and MoneyGram; to solve liquidity issues. The announcement was made on the 24th of January.

SBI Holdings

The SBI Group started off as a SoftBank Investment company in the fag-end of the 1990s in Tokyo. Now SBI is a financial services company that has a suite of reputed clients, runs a business school and also a children’s charity trust in Japan.

The group now represents a consortium of Japanese companies that together want to launch the SBI virtual currency. In order to do so, the SBI group announced their partnership with Ripple on the 30th of January. Which is a big break for both companies.

Apart from using Ripple to achieve almost full liquidity on cross-border payments, SBI Holdings also wants to set up a banking system that allows people to transfer funds in XRP within and outside the country with low transfer time and also plans to set up a banking structure that allows customers to convert XRP tokens to fiat currencies instantaneously.

Pleased to announce that SBI Virtual Currencies will be the first in the world to list $XRP as its primary fiat pair at beta launch. https://t.co/3VK0sBvnEt — Brad Garlinghouse (@bgarlinghouse) January 30, 2018

LianLian International

LianLian is a secure payment transfer service providers for merchants and consumers all over the world. The company is based out of China and is quite popular in the merchant community thanks to internet marketplaces like Amazon and eBay.

LianLian International announced their partnership with Ripple on the 14th of February. Their long term plan for the Ripple is to use it to break into the European and American financial market, facilitating their customers means of making and receiving cross-border payments without losing a large part of it in transaction fees.

It is pretty obvious that Ripple has the potential to change the way financial service providers work. These prestigious partnerships that Ripple has managed to get is a sheer testament to the same. The price of the Ripple token XRP is almost guaranteed by these ground-breaking partnerships, but it is important to keep in mind that the underlying technology is not that of a coin, but a payment protocol.

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