Moneygram shuns Ripple (XRP) in latest settlement product

Money transfer service MoneyGram launched a speedy remittance service for its customers, called FastSend, on Thursday. But it's missing something that will disappoint Ripple fans: XRP.

According to CoinTelegraph, the service will run using Visa but not Ripple technology or its cryptocurrency, XRP. Ripple is a financial services company that offers blockchain solutions for making faster cross-border payments.

The weird part is that Ripple purchased a $50 million stake in MoneyGram in June, on the premise that it would start using XRP for cross-border transactions and remittance. And MoneyGram has already started to use Ripple: In August, MoneyGram CEO Alex Holmes said, on its quarterly earnings call, that MoneyGram had been making transactions on the xRapid platform. He added, at the time, that it had shown a number of benefits, particularly with the speed of transactions.

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But it appears that MoneyGram has other ideas. In September, it announced a new debit card deposit service with Visa. The service, which works with Visa’s real-time payments platform, Visa Direct, makes it possible for MoneyGram customers to transfer money to over a billion Visa cards using MoneyGram.

And now we know that it's latest product, FastSend, won't be using XRP—even though it's a product that would be suited to fast, cross-border payments. The service will allow MoneyGram customers to send money in real time, without using a blockchain. It will run on Visa's Direct Original Credit Transaction system.

In August, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said the deal with MoneyGram would be bigger than Libra. Considering that Libra hasn't even got off the ground, perhaps the comparison was apt.