“American Express distinctly understands the issues that SMEs face with traditional banking, from cross-border payments to access to credit. The company’s “Open Forum” is a highly regarded and popular platform for resources and support to help small-to-medium businesses grow.”

“Together with Ripple the companies are working to address the problems their customers face with cross-border payments. Ripple’s xCurrent provides a new blockchain based infrastructure for global payments. American Express customers are connecting to this infrastructure in a way that is designed for maximum impact and the best possible user experience.”

“With Ripple-powered blockchain helping facilitate transactions behind the scenes, American Express customers in the U.S. are already seeing quicker payments. Ripple and American Express have also aligned from a fraud perspective — risk, user experience and customer service. This has allowed for a “holistic experience” that’s ultimately benefited the customer.”

American Express, or AMEX are an international financial services company that provide wealth’s of customers with banking and payments solutions. Here in the UK, AMEX is more associated with business customers however personal AMEX accounts are available. Overall, AMEX are estimated to hold a revenue of around $33 Billion and have an employee base of over 50,000. In essence, they are huge. Therefore, it’s quite fascinating that Ripple have name dropped AMEX, not in a new tweet, or a similar viral style post, instead, they have written a full news piece about AMEX and have uploaded it to the news section of their website. You can see it for yourself, here- https://ripple.com/insights/american-express-and-ripple-at-money20-20-europe-changing-the-cross-border-payments-experience-for-smes/ This post discusses some challenges faced by small/medium sized businesses who need to carry out cross border payments. Within traditional campaigns, these payments come with heavy fees and often take a long time to settle. At the moment, AMEX are one such company that offer cross border payments to companies. On the flip side, AMEX also recognise that these companies need to make frequent payments of small value, very quickly, so often traditional methods aren’t suitable. According to Ripple:Moreover:As it stands, American Express are currently using Ripple’s xCurrent to process some payments, now it seems that American Express wish to expand on this and wish to develop new fraud prevention services as a part of their cross-border payment solution, on the Ripple blockchain Ready for the most exciting part of all of this-Does this mean, we could see Ripple’s XRP added into the AMEX portfolio. Of course, it would have great bearing on the AMEX plan to develop a fraud proof solution and most importantly, it would help AMEX achieve the task of creating a service that works worldwide, with large transaction flows. This is entirely based on speculation, but for the first time in a long time we can see a true use for Ripple XRP, as a part of an already working project, alongside an established, well versed financial service provider. If nothing else, this has got to make you wonder.