Southeast Asia is one of the fastest growing region. Each of its members contribute to the rapid economic growth in its own way. Decades ago most countries in Southeast Asia were third world countries. Thanks to the economic growth most of those nations have become second world and first world countries. Some of those second world countries are already nearing their first world country status. Since all this has happening, the spending power of The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) citizens have dramatically increased over the years. This has lead to more of the citizens travelling across the region for tourism, jobs and business opportunities. For instance Indonesians migrate to Malayasia for job opportunitius and the same goes for Malaysians migrating to Singapore. This migration trend is occuring among all the member nations of ASEAN till ASEAN citizens don’t need visas for short term visits to ASEAN member nations. Not just migrating in SEA, ASEAN citizens are also constantly migrating to other regions and they are also frequently travelling to other regions as tourists as they have a high spending power.

This situation has created a huge demand for cross border payments and transfers. Using services like Western Union is costly and making cross border payments via local banks could be time consuming. This is creating problems for those who frequently conduct cross border payments in the region. For example if someone wants to transfer money from nation A to nation B he would have to spend a lot of money on the fees.

Ripple (XRP) is the answer to all this problems. The current minimum transaction cost required by the network for a standard transaction is 0.00001 XRP (10 drops). It sometimes increases due to higher than usual load. You can also query ripple for the current transction cost. Ripple has a very low transaction fee compared to other cryptos and traditional banking methods. Moreover, ripple (XRP) offers high transaction speeds. XRP registers progress on a daily basis at such speeds, that it is not always possible to cover major news all the time. But the news of a number of ripple transactions crossing that of VISA at twice the rate has managed to gain major momentum. Recent updates report that XRP can now deal with a processing of 50,000 transactions per second in relation to VISA’s 24,000 transactions per second. #

Until now 300+ institutions have joined the RippleNet network. Only a handful are from SEA. Thats is not enough, more financial institutions from member nations of ASEAN should join the network to promote faster and cheaper cross border transactions. They can also use RippleNet to improve the quality of local transactions. Those in ASEAN who need to make cross border payments dont need to make cross border transactions using fiat via banks, they could just buy Ripple (XRP) on any exchange that sells it like Binance and Coinbase and perform the transaction using Ripple. Then the reciever of the Ripple could just convert the Ripple back to Fiat via Ripple (XRP) supported exchange.







Ripple is slowly gaining momentum in Thailand as SBI Remit enables Thai nationals in Japan to send money home instantly. In collaboration with Siam Commercial Bank (SCB), SBI Remit is using RippleNet to power real-time remittance payments between Japan and Thailand. This makes it possible for 47,000 Thai nationals living in Japan to send money home faster. SBI Remit’s customers can use ATMs to instantly send money in JPY to a recipient’s SCB savings account in Thailand and receive funds in THB within seconds. Before offering this service, recipients were required to retrieve cash through an agent.







More ASEAN member nations should take this as an example to improve cross border payments among ASEAN nations. More ASEAN based banks should join RippleNet to improve existing banking systems in SEA.

Reference

http://ripple.com/

https://ripple.com/customer-case-study/sbi-remit/

https://globalcoinreport.com/how-ripple-xrp-outdid-the-transaction-speed-of-visa/

https://xrpl.org/transaction-cost.html/