Ripple, the firm behind the third largest cryptocurrency XRP, has made a new partnership to bolster cross-border payments between the United States and Mexico.

The company has partnered with International Money Express, a money remittance services firm focused on the Latin and Caribbean corridor, Ripple announced on Feb. 5. Also known as Intermex, the new financial partner of Ripple is listed on the Nasdaq stock market with the stock quote IMXI.

The new partnership could enable Intermex to implement Ripple's On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) product through RippleNet, the company’s global payment network connecting financial institutions. RippleNet’s ODL relies on the digital asset XRP as a real-time bridge between the sending and receiving of currencies to enable faster and cheaper cross-border transactions.

As such, Intermex, which is reportedly processing more than 30 million payment transactions annually, intends to provide its customers with faster, cheaper and transparent cross-border payments between the U.S. and Mexico. According to data from the World Bank, Mexico is one of the largest remittance recipients after India and China, having operated $36 million in remittance flows in 2019.

Ripple continues to expand its presence in Mexico’s remittance market

By partnering with Intermex, Ripple continues to expand its presence in Mexico’s large remittance market as the company has already provided its ODL service to the world’s second-largest remittances firm — MoneyGram International. As reported by Cointelegraph, both the ODL platform and XRP cryptocurrency have been part of MoneyGram’s operations since August 2019.

In November 2019, MoneyGram CEO Alex Holmes reportedly said that 10% of his company’s business between the U.S. and Mexico was operated via Ripple’s ODL. On top of that, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse claimed that MoneyGram using XRP was a bigger deal than Facebook’s stablecoin project Libra.

In late December 2019, Ripple raised $200 million in a new funding round, claiming that the investment marked a record year for the business and its “strongest year of growth to date in 2019.”