
Ripple is yet in another move to widen its network and coverage. The focus to provide seamless, faster and cheaper way of transferring money across borders utilizing blockchain-based financial tools has stirred the crypto platform to extend its reach to one of the busiest commercial cities of the world, Dubai.

Ripple’s Global Head of Infrastructure Innovation, Dilip Rao, in his speech at a conference in Dubai, revealed Ripple’s plan to extend its network spread to the Middle East. This new office would be set up before the end of 2018, about 200 financial institutions from around the world have already signed up.

“Rao confirmed that Ripple has signed up close to 200 institutions “around the world” with “many of them” from the Middle East. Calling it the “fastest growing marketplace.”

Many of the financial institutions that signed up are from the Middle East, they see this as the fastest growing marketplace. Some of the clients are the largest Islamic Bank in Saudi Arabia, Al-Rajihi, also on the list is Kuwait Finance House.

Rao stated in his speech, what Ripple is set to achieve by entering the Middle East. Ripple will not only focus on enhancing the cross-border payment system but also the business transactions are done with the rest of the world.

He laid emphasis on the difficulty encountered by people in UAE, in transferring money across other nations, and defined it as costly and slow exercise. Rao cited an example with South Asia, where people have given up on using SWIFT but have invented a more suitable technology which enables quicker and cheaper transfer of money to meet customer’s demand.


Rao went on to identify the most affected segment who experience payment difficulties as the blue-collar workers who have to need to remit money continuously to their families at fees as high as 5-10%.

He stated that ripple is focused on solving these payment problems and it will give them the opportunity to “build the basis for a digital economy.”

“If you now think about machines talking to each other doing, maybe 50 billion transactions every year. We are now talking about micropayments a tenth of a cent. The existing infrastructure is unable to cope with these very low value, high volume transactions. We think that is a requirement to build a new set of infrastructure to be able to support this kind of a digital economy.”

Ripple’s spread into the Middle East will further widen its coverage and versatility, with so many institutions already set to partner with them. This is likely going to be a big launch out for Ripple judging from the fact that UAE is a center of commercial activities.

Watch Video Of Dilip Rao At Global Islamic Economic Summit 2018