Chilean remittance firm goes live with Ripple's technology

Peer-to-peer remittance company CurrencyBird has expanded its cross-border payments offering, adding Ripple's technology earlier this month. It is available to the firm's 12,000 customers. It's one of a long list of companies to join RippleNet.

According to a statement, this partnership will provide a host of benefits, allowing CurrencyBird to add new destinations to its payment network, offer different currencies, lower its fees, and introduce faster transaction times.

RippleNet is a network of institutional payment providers, including remittance businesses and banks, that move money across the globe. It offers services, such as xRapid, which makes use of the cryptocurrency XRP. RippleNet reported in January this year that it has more than 200 partners around the world. At the time, CEO Brad Garlinghouse said the network has been seeing two or three new customers join each week since last year.

CurrencyBird becomes the first business Ripple has partnered with in Chile, where the remittance market has been steadily growing. According to data from The Dialogue, since 2010, more money now gets sent out of Chile on a yearly basis than comes into the country—making it a gold mine for cross-border payment providers.