Amazon Teams Up With Western Union, As Ripple (XRP) Waits On The Bench For A Chance.

Western Union, has been around for almost a century and a half. The firm specializes in money transfers across the globe. Therefore the announcement that the company was teaming up online behemoth Amazon makes sense. This move is intended to give Amazon shoppers the advantage to shop online and make payments in person, should they wish to, as well as have the option to pay in their local currency.

Commenting on this collaboration, Hikmet Ersek, President and CEO of Western Union, says

“There are people in the world who want greater access to Amazon’s huge product selection but paying for those purchases has been a real obstacle for many customers. We’re leveraging our money movement platform to make it easier to shop global and pay local. By facilitating the complex foreign exchange and settlement process, we’re opening up more consumer choices and access to online shopping for tens of millions of potential new Amazon customers.”

With this announcement, it is hoped, Western Union’s money remittance platform will make it easier for customers at amazon.com. At the moment these new features are being offered to shoppers in a select few countries. This move is no doubt to iron out any potential issues with Amazon interfacing with the Western Union agent network.

It is clear that Amazon's intention is to expand on their consumer base by making the shopping experience as hassle-free as possible. A paper published by Forrester Research concluded in its analysis that by 2022 online purchases is going account for over $600 billion. This is about one-fifth of the total sales, from cross-border shopping.

Thus, some commentators were a little surprised that a future tech was not employed to find a more sustainable solution. This is all the more glaring when such an option is available with RIppleNet, a network already developed an used by major banks across the world.

Amazon undoubtedly wanted to link up with a global player with a strong presence the world over. Western Union fit the description perfectly, in that sense. However, modern economies face a new challenge; that of seamless payment options for consumers wanting to shop in an increasingly integrated online economy. This is where Ripple, with a host of tools to achieve hassle-free cross-border payments, has a leg up on Western Union.

In fact, in a recent article, Cory Johnson, an executive at Ripple pointed out how Amazon is paying nearly a billion dollars in Nostro accounts; this is just so that they can pay their users across the globe. Had the company decided to use Ripple, the tools afforded by them would have certainly served Amazon that money

Further, Ripple’s digital asset XRP has multiple options to chose from. xRapid, is one which is fast and has the state of the art communication system via the RIppleNet. Another is xCurrent that processes payments in less than thirty seconds. Had these been implemented, not only would the company have saved on a huge recurring cost but also future-proofed itself. Now it will be interesting to see how, for that matter if, Western Union modernizes itself to serve the changing times.