- The cooperation between Ripple and Coinone is consolidated as an alternative to traditional institutions.
- Foreign workers in South Korea have adopted the remittance services by Coinone and Ripple.
The cooperation between Ripple and the financial services company Coinone has gained ground in South Korea. The cooperation is focused on offering a fast, low-cost, cross-border alternative for remittances. According to a blog post by Ripple, one of the challenges of the cooperation was winning customers, whereby the partners were able to gain the trust of users in South Korea.
The cooperation was launched in late 2018 by SBI Ripple Asia to launch Cross, the first blockchain-based remittance service. In the Asian country, remittance payments have long been dominated by banks and traditional financial institutions. The value of the remittance market in South Korea is estimated at 33 billion dollars. Therefore, Coinone has experienced a fierce competition to enter the market, as Camille Jeong of Coinone points out.
People were used to going to the bank to send money abroad. We are not a bank so we had to work hard to gain the trust of customers. The unique Ripple-powered benefits of our service and innovative marketing brought people in. Our superior customer experience kept them coming back and our retention rate is now more than 80%.
Improvements in the remittance service driven by Ripple
One of Coinone’s priorities is to attract customers who are foreign workers. These customers use the remittance service to send money to their families and represent an important part of the market. In the past, they could only transfer money through banks, but banking services are slow and expensive. Jeong said that remittances could take days, unlike Ripple’s transactions, which only take a few seconds:
Global transfers were difficult for foreign workers (…). The payment could take as long as seven days to reach their family back home and the costs were really high, especially for the smaller value amounts typically sent by migrants.
In addition to improving the quality of life of foreign workers, cooperation with Ripple has enabled Coinone to connect with financial institutions in Thailand, the Philippines and Sri Lanka. According to Jeong, this has allowed Coinone to have lower operating cost what directly benefits its clients. Fees for using Coinone’s services are less than 1%. This has allowed Coinone to see a 50% growth each month in their transaction volume since October 2018.
The company will further seek to expand so that students abroad in countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States and Singapore can receive remittances. On the expansion, Jeong commented as follows:
We’re starting to connect with financial institutions in those countries via RippleNet to develop these new corridors. When this new audience trusts Coinone Transfer for payment and the great experience keeps them coming back, our business will grow stronger.
As reported by the CNF, the partnership with Coinone is not the only one of Ripple’s partnerships that has had great success. Ripple, together with Bitso, has been able to capture a large share of the US-Mexico remittance market. The corridor for the pair XRP/MXN (Mexican pesos) pair has doubled its transaction volume since December 2019. Bitso CEO Daniel Vogel recently said he expects to handle 20% of all remittances between the United States and Mexico by the end of 2020.
Follow us on Facebook and Twitter and don’t miss any hot news anymore! Do you like our price indices?
