Walmart has announced collaborations with two Ripple partners, MoneyGram and Ria, to launch an international money transfer marketplace serving all 4,700 United States Walmart stores.
The American global retail corporation founded in 1962 says it created Walmart2Walmart to offer flat and low fee intra-country money transfer to its customers. This year, Walmart launched Walmart2World to ease the mode of cross-border remittance with the same game-changing model of Walmart2Walmart.
Over the years, consumers of the service have saved around $1 billion with Walmart’s low-cost service idea, reducing the costs but heightening competition across the money transfer industry.
To reduce the transaction cost further, and make remittance through Walmart more seamless, the firm is launching the market place with its two new principal collaborators, who are also running on Ripple, MoneyGram, and Ria.
In the next few weeks, Walmart2World customers have the advantage of using either MoneyGram or Ria for international remittance.
The Walmart2World marketplace provides customers exclusive choices for payout methods with more payout locations across the world. The platform also offers more competitive foreign exchange rates at a transparent low-cost fee.
Speaking on the progress, Wilbert Noronha, Vice President of Financial Services Walmart U.S, said the goal of the idea was to launch a platform with money transfer principally to enable customers to have more meaningful choices while sending funds to friends and family across countries.
The Vice President said partnering with Ria will increase competition and bring more value to Walmart2World.
For almost two decades, MoneyGram and Walmart have been key partners, says Alex Holmes, Chief Executive Officer, MoneyGram.
Ripple in the Game?
Although the partnerships have not linked Ripple directly, both MoneyGram and Ria are key Ripple partners. Ria and MoneyGram make use of Ripple for seamless remittance service.
Ripple has recently invested in MoneyGram, the second largest remittance firm, who is now making use of xRapid [On-Demand Liquidity], an innovation that directly involves use of the XRP token for cross-border payments. According to MoneyGram CEO, xRapid has made MoneyGram’s remittance more seamless and cheaper.
MoneyGram is now working to increase Ripple’s on-demand liquidity to more countries before the end of the year. The firm is using Ripple to offer better services to its customers across the globe.
“Our third quarter results reflect the continued transformation of our business as we increasingly focus on customer experience improvements, cross-border digital growth and industry-leading innovation through our strategic partnership with Ripple,” says MoneyGram’s Holmes.
