The Western Union Company is an American financial services company. They performed a trial using Ripple’s xRapid blockchain tech and are not satisfied with what they are seeing.
Western Union is the largest money transfer service in the world. The service shocked the crypto world in February this year when it announced that it would be trialing Ripple’s XRP cryptocurrency to see if it could make money transfers faster and cheaper.
Here we stand five months later, and Western Union’s CEO has finally shed some light on the current results of the trial. Western Union CEO Hikmet Ersek told Fortune that his firm has not seen any significant improvements when using Ripple’s blockchain technology. “The practical matter is it’s still too expensive,” said Ersek. “We are always criticized that Western Union is not cost-efficient, blah blah blah, but we did not see that part of the efficiency yet during our tests”
Ripple quickly responded to the comments, with its senior vice president of product, Asheesh Birla, pointing out that Western Union had only performed ten transactions with XRP and thus it is not surprising that they did not see favorable results. Birla stated that if Western Union were to fully convert to using xRapid for payments that the company would see at least a 50% reduction in transaction costs.
Ersek told Fortune that he did not wish to end the trial yet. Ersek says that the company is still considering using XRP for settlement purposes but only if XRP can show some cost-efficiency improvements in further testing.
